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

Hello Liam,

Thanks for the feedback but in my case this relinking the Onedrive App as a serious consequence. I had to do that relink once before and it was painful process to get through.

The reason is that also my Synology NAS uses MS Onedrive (Cloud Backup app). It is syncing encrypted (selective) NAS files and folders to Onedrive. As I have 1 TB of storage is good use as Cloud backup storage from my home NAS as distaster recovery (e.g. house burns down).

For the Onedrive App on my laptop I have excluded specific the NAS backup folder to be synced and of course not allowing all to be download locally back to my humble laptop.

The moment, I do the relinking, as you mentioned and I know too, OneDrive will also first scan all online folders and files. Including the NAS ones. These are of course an enormous amount of files. Which actually don't need to be even shown on my laptop's Onedrive. Only in the second stage I can unselect that NAS backup Folder from the Onedrive App on my laptop. Actually I would love you could do that earlier. Or Onedrive would remember in the cloud your previous Onedrive Settings or offer at least to import them.

Update: possible solution - sign out sign in

Okay, here is an update because I got fed up with waiting. I thought I would just try something else on one of the devices I was having trouble with. There are two. Both had something like 200,000 changes at the time of writing, which it was apparently working through. And both had gone up before starting to come down! By the way, both computers have been running since my first post two days ago, and neither has finished despite my best predictions that they would.

Anyway, here's what I've just done, and it seems to have worked. Caveat: I haven't exhaustively reviewed all changes I may have made.

If you have unsynchronised changes, please take a copy of your local OneDrive folder before doing this**. You might remember which files have changed and can just copy these. I plan to use BeyondCompare later to check.**

Steps

1. Right-click the OneDrive icon, click the Settings (gear icon) and go to "Account"
2. Click "Unlink this PC". Confirm the action and pray to your chosen deity.
3. OneDrive will tell you that it is signing out. This took a few minutes on mine.
4. If you look at your OneDrive folder (c:\users[yourlogin]\OneDrive) the local files should still be there. Don't change anything!
5. Go to C: and delete c:\OneDrive.Temp or similar name (I deleted mine so I may have forgotten the exact name)
6. Right-click the OneDrive icon again and now click "Sign in"
7. Enter your email (same one as used before) for the OneDrive account and click Sign in
8. On the next screen "Your OneDrive folder" if you weren't previously using the default location change the location to where your OneDrive files already are.
9. When you click next, it should ask you, "A OneDrive folder already exists on this PC." Click "Use this folder."
10. I skipped the Backup step in favour of reviewing this later.
11. Then click next a bunch more times. Skip the mobile app ****.
12. You should then get "Your OneDrive is ready for you"

Warning! It will now synchronise every folder like the first time you added it. Another issue has been reported for this, and it is also very frustrating. Once it has completed, you can untick some of the folders by clicking the "Choose folders" button under "Account". However, decided I would just let it finish before clicking the Free up disk space button, but you could possibly try it so you don't run out of disk space.

In all, the process took less than 30 minutes. I hope you have the same luck!

TL;DR

Click "Unlink this PC". Then sign back in and select the same folder as before. Hey presto!

This thread is 100% about endlessly processing (hundred) of thousands files to process. And I do see the files processing with a rate of ~1 file/sec. This should be a thread that people should respond to with the same disastrous situation.

Facing exactly the same since this week of my post. Up to 1 Million changes Onedrive thinks it needs to progress with a slow pace of a few changes per second. I even let my laptop run over 24h to see what happens. However it starts over and over again like an endless loop. It also makes Onedrive un-operatable. Microsoft, you screwed Onedrive up again.

I read from another post on the same subject.

The response from Microsoft is WAIT AND DO NOTHING for now.

In my case i.e. with the average rate of 1 file/sec to process and I have apparently over ~1M files to process this is going to take ages. More or less leaving my laptop running and connected to the internet for 14 days (24/7) in a row. Microsoft you must be kidding that this is the solution. WAIT VIRTUAL ENDLESSLY.

Wait, I thought the reason why this is happening has already been explained? It's Microsoft doing an upgrade to their OneDrive systems from v1 to v2. You just need to wait for the files to re-process. Some users have reported that signing out and re-signing in has helped increase this re-processing rate.