why would my OneDrive suddenly be processing over 40,000 changes?

I have the same issue today. No obvious reason why it has to reprocess over a quarter million files.. Argh - a lot of CPU consumption for no apparent reason. This has not happened often, but even 3 or 4 times in a couple years raises a red flag regarding the durability of the Onedrive cloud system.

Same for me. Build version: 25.070.0413.0001
Never-ending processing, even if I don't change anything.
If I change, it simply doesn't get there, because of the hundred-thousands non-existing "changes" it works on...
Reintsall, unlink-relink didn't help. Annoying... :(

The worst it is that new files dont sync by the meantime.

I have to use a usb drive again.

same issue.. and it's May 2025..

had this before and couldn't find a resolution, save for letting OneDrive finish the 'processing'
OneDrive sits there counting down 'Processing xxxxxx changes'
Restarting OneDrive makes it reset and count up, to get it's restart point and then continue counting down.

OneDrive is out of action until the 'processing' completes.
You cannot open/edit/save any office (Word/Excel) documents until the 'processing changes' clears and gets to 0.
No new documents sync until after the 'processing' reaches 0

This is effectively a DOS (Denial Of Service) attack/bug or whatever..
OneDrive and the computer are out of action for hours or days, until this 'processing' completes.

My speculation:

• Is it an issue at Microsoft where they have had to restore the storage data (no data loss) but all the sync pointers have been lost so it has to scan through the whole contents of your OneDrive?
• Is it (given the current geopolitical crisis) Government agencies taking copies of data and buggering up the 'sync' pointer?
• Just a plain bug in the client or the host? Maybe a buffer overload or similar that causes the client or host to crash buggering up the sync pointers?
• This seems to happen more on oneDrive accounts that have >40k files [I have several OD accounts]

David (Nobby) Barnes

I have two laptops syncing to my Personal One Drive (1TB). The second work PC also has a Onedrive sync to a OneDrive Business (100 TB)
The interesting part is that my personal use laptop remains every time I boot it up getting to ~500k files to change. The business laptop shows for the same personal Onedrive even over 1M (million) changes to process. Like double amount. On both laptops Onedrive processes like 1-2 files per sec, terrible slow.
You can calculate that this takes days, weeks even to get in sync, if ever. However my laptops go to sleep or shutdown at the end of the day. Although I left one running for over 2 days. So the cycle of having 500k or 1M changes to process never gets broken. Every time I bootup the PC they get first to this high number of thousands of files. Then it starts slowly counting down, I do see that.

Note: On the Business laptop the Onedrive Business (100 TB of available storage) remains 100% in sync so far with also literally thousands of files on the Onedrive Cloud. Hence so far no issues.