Force sync in OneDrive

and what to do if onedrive.exe does not run at all????

I agree that a little button would help a lot!

I downvoted Mr. Nhiel T's answer ... although it would probably work, it's a stupid solution. Unlink and then Re-link? First of all, this should NOT be necessary in the first place. Secondly, another thing to try FIRST if a file or files are not syncing would be to PAUSE syncing and then RESUME syncing. I've found that usually works. Another action that generally works is logging out of your windows account and then logging back in. UNLINKING AND THEN RELINKING MAY CAUSE A VERY LONG UPDATE PROCESS TO COMMENCE ! I agree with Buck0182, a simple "sync button" or option to force a sync should be available in the app. This could be easily added to the right-click menu on the onedrive icon in system tray.

I found in settings - "download all files" -

[removed - COC violation]

Seems fairly useless. You offer 3 options. I am using a work laptop travelling on a mobile plan with limited data. 1) Your first option is unworkable for a large amount of files and data, and limited data plan. 2) cmd.exe would be nice to try but is locked out by sys admins. 3) useless. onedrive online says it is already syncing and seems like no way to force it to manually sync the affected file, or even stop then restart the sync. In my case every time I open a file, it locks it out from renaming or moving as it can't sync the 'changes' - Onedrive gives a useless non-ending message 'Processing changes'.

Users have suffered from Microsoft's incompetent coding of Onedrive's sync functionality for years, with all that can be offered are convoluted workarounds that may or may not work, or the most ridiculous one being akin to fully removing the files (then waiting an impossibly long amount of time, not to mention if you have limited data plan when travelling) to sync every file from scratch.