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Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | MacOS
A Microsoft file hosting and synchronization service.
Sneha
I don’t understand how you can claim there are sync issues. There are no errors, warnings, or any of that sort. One would expect that the OneDrive app would report if there were sync issues.
In short: The reset did not solve the issue. OneDrive on mac is keeping two copies of all downloaded files. The reset resulted in yet another copy of all files (in "~/ OneDrive-Personal (Archive)") and lost all my symbolic links. I burned a lot of CPU energy (not very environmentally friendly) for no apparent reason.
The detailed story:
I did check with Safari in private browsing mode that I can log in and access my documents on https://onedrive.live.com. As expected, I had no issues and full access to my documents.
Before doing the OneDrive reset, I suggest running:
> cd ~/OneDrive
> find . -type l -exec ls -l {} \;
This will provide a list of all symlinks and what they point to. Save the list, this will be needed to reestablish your symbolic links after the reset.
I then performed the reset (for the 4^th^ time in the last two months):
> cd /Applications/OneDrive.app/Contents/Resources
> ./ResetOneDriveAppStandalone.command > ~/tmp/reset.txt 2>&1
The command ran for ~5 minutes and did not indicate any issues in the output.
I then started the OneDrive app and did the initial configuration, and it started to build the OneDrive (empty) structure. Selected “Download all OneDrive files now” and did set “File collaboration” to off and waited…
The CPU went to 250 - 350% (total of OneDrive, OneDrive File Provider and fileproviderd processes). The first 15 minutes was spent on building the empty structure and then it started to download files.
While downloading I did a few comparisons of disk used in ~/OneDrive (the primary) and ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/. To little surprise the disk usage at both locations grew slowly and were the same – so even during initial initialization OneDrive is keeping two copies of all downloaded files.
After about 8 hours the download was completed, but not fully. I had to select “Download all OneDrive files now” one more time and the remaining 9 GB was downloaded.
And to little surprise I am again in the exact same situation. All downloaded files exist in 2 copies, one in the “primary” and one in the “secondary”. Once bitten, twice shy I now have a script to restore my symlinks which were “lost”.
After downloading was completed, it was clear that nothing had changed - OneDrive on Mac is keeping two copies of all downloaded files.
In reality I think this is just one of several bugs and deficiencies in the OneDrive app lately. I have been a user of OneDrive on Mac for at least 10 years. In the early years there were some hick-ups, but for many years it performed its job without much fuss. Then came the change to default to “Files On-Demand” – and since then it has been a problem app, lately causing kernel panics and now keeping two copies of all downloaded files and using way too much CPU.
I would strongly urge MS to perform an in-depth review of this app on the Mac. Both structure and algorithms and a detailed code-review. I would suggest focusing on the parts related to “Files on Demand” – there must be something very wrong there.
Also, it is mind-blowing that there are two versions of the “same” application and that they are so different. I cannot comprehend that you have an Appel App store version and the Standalone version. Dev-ops would be so much simpler if you only had one version of the app – and that would likely lead to fewer bugs. Havoc will happen if you switch from one to the other. Suggest that you build a proper uninstall function for each version.
Once the review is done, the development team should be solely focused on reliability, availability, serviceability, usability, and installability (RASUI) for some time and postpone new features. Once you have a solid and stable app, then new features can be added under rigorous testing.
OneDrive is a professional commercial app we are paying for – it is the least you can do.
What to do now?
/Mikael