Force sync in OneDrive

If you are truly a MS human agent, and not just a stupid bot, you need to elevate this.

It is absolutely inexcusable that MS did not think about a manual, force-sync command option when designing OneDrive to begin with! But it is even more unconscionable that you have had it working this long out in the wild, and obviously customers figured out files do not sync fast enough to meet their operational needs, and MS has NOT modified the code to implement a QUICK AND SIMPLE method to force sync!

You need serious help in systems engineering. Luckily, I am a highly experienced aerospace systems engineer who can help you. Contact me to initiate a NDA and to know my consulting fees. Your org seriously needs to understand how operational modeling helps you understand your customer needs before you ever release your first version of code!

Ray "Rainman" Hudson
Huntington Beach, CA
http://sepherotech.com

I had this happen twice today on two different machines. It took 30 minutes to properly open the files each time. That is incredibly inefficient. When using Office for Mail Merge and Excel as a data file, this is always an issue. One, you cannot use mail merge through the one drive Office. You have to open the main document externally. Then forget it if you change the data source, then you are in the forever loop of incorrect data to merge. Closing, opening, begging it to sync.

As long as you never close anything, it is easier. If the power goes off (yeah yeah yeah, the battery backup is also being wacky), it also does the weird sync pause issues.

We are still begging for a hard sync now button, pretty please.

Forced reconciliation of files kept in two locations can be achieved if you quit OneDrive and then restart it again on both of your computers - then your files will be synchronized.

Quite a lot of clicks have to be performed if you do it manually:

To quit - click OneDrive icon on your taskbar, then click "Help and Settings", then click "Pause syncing", then click "Quit OneDrive" command - and finally in the pop-up dialog box click again "Quit OneDrive" button to confirm it.

To restart - click Search box on the Taskbar, start typing OneDrive - then in the Apps section select OneDrive, and at last that initiates synchronization with the cloud.

To be sure that you have your files in sync on both places - this had to be done on both of them.

To make my life easier and drastically reduce the number of mouse clicks, I wrote the following batch file which I keep on the desktops of my PC and laptop:

cd %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive

OneDrive.exe /shutdown

OneDrive.exe /background

This works for me - hope it will work for you too. Maybe not perfect - but bearable solution

So far I haven't found any way to force a reconciliation. It seems that this is a fundamental requirement when there are copies of filres in two locations.