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

I had to let 3 computers on for 3-4 full days each and it at least brought the situation to normal. Some files or folders were renamed with the name of the computer and we had to reorganize some unmerged changes.

Also, a shared folder I've had for years is now an URL instead of an actual folder in File Explorer. It's annoying. No need to give me the answer here as it's not the same issue but I suspect it's related to ongoing issues with OneDrive.

Three pages of responses since the original post over a month ago and no resolution?

OneDrive is like this dark mysterious thing that moves about in the shadows and has us all by the whaah whaahs, doing what it wants, how it wants and when it wants without explaining a single thing.

My OneDrive is at 25.025.0209.0001, updated today (7th March 2025), and I see that OD started updating over 200K files on my desktop computer. Admittedly, the number is dropping fast, but the version update obviously still has the same issue.

I've had problems with OD before, needing to re-download almost everything (600GB+) to my hard drive, when the connection got screwed up. (I have a 4TB SSD and use OD as one of my offline backups, not as the only repository of my data). There was very little practical help from MS then, and it's the same now.

I'm minded to move my OD files to Dropbox - I have space available - except for the time it would take. I'd presumably have to do it in batches in case my internet provider would balk at such an amount of data being transferred, and slow my connection down.

Very unsatisfactory service from MS, yet again!

After noticing that no further reply from Microsoft after 3 pages of comment, i reached out to my own company's IT team, they replied that Microsoft support team said "recommend syncing no more than a total of 300,000 files across your cloud storage. Performance issues can occur if you have more than 300,000 items, even if you are not syncing all items.".

As I'm not an IT specialist, dont know if this is the root cause of the "changes happening every now and then at OneDrive". I had tried all the method mentioned by Microsoft team in previous reply (e.g. re-setting one drive, etc.) but those >7000 changes still occur.

Wonder what are those changes are even without anyone changing those files. Simply saying "not recommend syncing more than 300,000 files" seems not explanatory enough.

Same issue for me on two different Windows 11 machines just started this month (March 2025) after installing a Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Version 24H2...I have left one machine on for a day to complete the processing changes and now doing on my other...this better not result in losing data or having it altered in some massive way.

I just noticed that my Win 11 PC is doing the same thing. It updated a couple days ago (3-14-2025) and this is the first time that I have been on it and it just says processing 112,000 changes and slowly counting down. I found some random things that are apparently syncing, but they aren't files that I have accessed in quite some time and there is no indication as to what they are actually doing. In general, it gives no indication what it's doing or why. Microsoft seems to just be screwing everything up. Worse than normal.