Microsoft Auto Update gives "One or more updates package could not be downloaded" message

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your reply.

I am sorry about the issue caused some inconvenience for you, I could understand your feeling.

I am trying my best to help you.

About your question, Normally, when we are updating Office, it will be download to the following path:

/private/var/folders/5v/9hp4r0s51t1g2b17p6xjz18m0000gn/T/MSau_1502

After install Office updates, it will be delated automatically.

Regards,

Qing

Qing

Thanks.

I have other Macs in my home and they update fine so this is something limited to one Mac.

The problem has spanned multiple updates with multiple operating system - Sierra, Mojave, etc.

It works the same in SAFE MODE and NEW USER.

The Mac is a 2.5ghz retina I7 running 10.14.5 (latest) and has no other symptoms.

Autoupdate works on Adobe and other applications.

There are no 3rd party applications on this Mac - just MS and Adobe subscriptions.

One acceptation - a contact management and CRM application. It is a very mature and well-supported product. It is called "Daylite."

Downloading the newest MAU because it cannot be updated as normal, generally does not fix the problem. ie. when the next update after 12.26 comes out, MAU will list the updates and when I try to download it will give me the "One or more update packages..." message and fail the download. I will have to manually download the entire package. If if I download the new MAU only, it will fail to download the other packages. (this speaking from the experience of having done this for multiple updates)

The one question we really need to answer - what folder does this update download to? If we can get an answer to that and perhaps the companion answer - what else does the update do while downloading the packages? We might get some insight into what is going wrong on this particular Mac.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your updates.

According to your description, when you install the newest Microsoft AutoUpdate tool, there is not the update option occurring.

The issue may be related to the Microsoft AutoUpdate tool, you can check if the issue occurs when you update Office next time.

If the issue still exists, you are welcome to post back, I will keep working on this.

Regards,

Qing

OK

Spent more time looking around on the MS support website. My basic premiss - the MAU latest version is not the latest version everywhere on the MS website.

The MAU I have is 4.12 build "...901" but the one I'm looking for is 4.12 build "...700" - don't ask why it's a lower number - the first part is different so doesn't matter.

I finally found this version ...700 and it is located here.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/update-office-for-mac-automatically-bfd1e497-c24d-4754-92ab-910a4074d7c1?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Now support gave me other links and I found other links but they all had build ...901 and when I installed that it was not any different.

But this build ...700 must be the 4.12.0 that is being referred to under the MAU update entry.

Anyway now that it is installed there is no longer any updates showing for installation. 

Next time a new version comes out - I'm running the latest right now 12.26 - so next version 12.27 we'll see if this still works. 

Note that my manual download of the MAU didn't really fix the autoupdate problem. The MAU would not autoupdate to the newer version so it was a manual fix. It is most likely that the problem of not auto-updating is still there and I still need a fix.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for posting on our forum.

I could understand your feeling, it caused some inconvenience for you.

According to your description, I suggest you create a new user profile to check if you can update normally:

macOS Sierra: Set up users, guests, and groups on your Mac

If you still meet the issue, I want to confirm when did the issue occurred, such as updating OS version?

You are welcome to post back, I will try my best to help you.

Regards,

Qing

OK so did that - created a new user account and opened and tried updating from MAU. Same issue - it showed the 4.12.0 update (version 700) and tried to download and stopped and gave the same "one or more update packages" message. I didn't see anything different in that newly created user account.

If you can tell me exactly where that MAU tries to download - the folder it's trying to create or the one it's trying to use, then I can look at and maybe rebuild permissions on that folder. It just acts like it's having a problem saving into that folder. 

Of course if it is trying to do something else at the same time - delete the old file, or something else, then it might not be as simple but it would be worth a try if I knew which folder we were using to download?