Posts Tagged ‘onedrive’

Another Fix for OneDrive / SkyDrive When Resetting and File Permissions Fixes Fail

Posted: January 8, 2015 in fix, Microsoft, OneDrive, SkyDrive, tip, Windows 8
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I’ve discussed at length how to fix SkyDrive sync issues. Check out Another possible solution for OneDrive / SkyDrive sync issues and Possible OneDrive / SkyDrive sync fix for Windows 8. I have found that sometimes even resetting SkyDrive doesn’t fix the problem. Microsoft will charge you for a brute force approach, but I figured out one more option if nothing you’ve tried has started syncing back up again. Before you follow these steps, try the other two – this is a last ditch resort!

1. Make sure all other desktop and “modern” applications are NOT running. Only File Explorer should be running. Word, Chrome, whatever – they should all be closed.

2. Press Windows Key + X, select Command Prompt (Admin), and the Windows command prompt should appear.

3. Make sure the OneDrive app isn’t running – right-click it and select Close if you see it in the taskbar.

4. Type skydrive /shutdown

5. Wait a minute.

6. Right-click the task bar and select Task Manager.

7. Keep trying to end the OneDrive Sync Engine process until it disappears, as shown in the figure below. This may take a few tries.

image

8. Open the following folder:
C:\Users\your user account name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\SkyDrive\settings
and you’ll see something like the figure below:

image

9. Delete all the files except for ClientPolicy.ini and global.ini.

10. Once they have been deleted, type the following: shutdown -r -t 0

11. Your computer should restart.

12. Log back in and your files should start resyncing. You’ll probably see results within a few hours. This will depend on the total number of files you have on OneDrive. You’ll also see downloads.txt and another funky-looking file start growing in size. If you see that, you know things are working, and OneDrive has started rebuilding everything.

Why isn’t OneDrive smart about tablets?

Posted: May 30, 2014 in Apps, Dell, Microsoft, OneDrive, SkyDrive, tablet, Venue Pro, Windows 8
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Quick thought for the day: Microsoft’s OneDrive doesn’t appear to act “smart” when it’s installed on a tablet, or what I prefer to call a Limited Storage Space Device. The premise of OneDrive is clear: store your stuff in the cloud and keep your device clean of clutter, holding local only what you need. Google made the same business case with their Chromebooks and Google Drive, but “cloud-first” is in its teenage years.

On a Limited Storage Device, such as a tablet or a phone, OneDrive should be smart enough to take offline, locally cached files, and make them “online only” again, freeing up the space. It doesn’t do this, and thus silently, and sometimes quickly, eats up storage on the device. Case in point: I recently drove Tail of the Dragon and took hundreds of photos. About one gigabyte of these I copied from my camera to OneDrive. One day later, my Dell Venue Pro 8 tablet started complaining of low drive space. OneDrive had copied the files from the cloud to the device, automatically, even though there was no reason to do so. The device wasn’t requesting those files. Yet, even if for whatever reason there was a valid request, shouldn’t OneDrive have “put them back” in the Cloud?

Microsoft – if you ever listen about device categories you’ve had a tough time understanding – you can’t treat these limited storage devices like mainstream PCs. You have to, pardon the pun, “think differently” and make your software do the same. The above scenario, where your Cloud solution makes a non-mainstream device relatively unusable due to a mainstream PC approach, is very common amongst your current product offerings. My gosh, just look at Office on a tablet.

Thanks for listening Smile

-Auri