OneDrive

OneDrive has been fairly well behaved of late and it is more than a year since I felt the need to moan at reference 1.

But the last two days have been a OneDrive pain, burning up maybe half a day all told, maybe more.

The trouble was caused by attempting to bring a laptop back into service which had not been used for a couple of months. Wired it into the router with an ethernet cable - which I thought might speed things up - and turned it on. Waited half a day or so while BT (Cloud) and Microsoft (OneDrive) did their synchronisation and update stuff, probably in competition. When they finally ground to a halt, BT (Cloud) announced that all was well, while Microsoft (OneDrive) announced that it had been unable to deal with 20 or so files.

All very puzzling, but it eventually turned out that OneDrive files which had been present when the laptop was last used but which had since been deleted, had been reinstated. OneDrive files which had been present when the laptop was last used but which had since been updated elsewhere, had been errored. The old file, decorated with a red spot in Windows Explorer, stayed on the laptop. And if one was not careful the old file got copied around OneDrive generally, wiping out the subsequent updates. And just to keep me on my toes, there were a dozen or so extra files with the word 'Mobile' tagged onto their names, files which I shall probably end up deleting.

Hard to be sure, but I don't think this is how it used to work. I think that when OneDrive Central was presented with a device that it hadn't seen for a while, it just copied down anything that was either absent on that device or which was present but had an earlier date than the one it had on its copy. Copy down new and amended files. Delete deleted files. Which arrangements suited me just fine.

As it is, I have had to mess about correcting the 20 or so files by hand, correction which is both tedious and error prone. Luckily, not being a very trusting sort of chap, I had taken a copy of everything before getting the laptop down from the roof.

Not what I pay monthly subscriptions to these people for at all. Productivity tools are supposed to be productive. Perhaps I shall revert to the old ways of doing things, when it was all under one's own control and one was not relying on other peoples' undocumented and so unreliable algorithms. In the meantime, it remains a mystery why Microsoft are not able to publish a proper guide to, proper documentation of OneDrive, seeming to rely instead on chatter on user forums to occupy that space. Maybe the cost of proper documentation would make a nasty dent in their bottom line.

PS: with all of this having been compounded by sundry internet connection problems on the returning laptop, with the connection needing to be poked at regular intervals.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/onedrive.html.