Skydrive on a new Windows install

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freitasm

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#115366 23-Mar-2013 15:13

I had my documents folder in sync with Skydrive. I decided to install Windows 8 and copied the documents folder from my NAS (faster than downloading from Skydrive). I then installed Skydrive and pointed to the same folder as before (\users\username\Skydrive).

After a week all folders are showing the "sync icon" instead of the green tick.

Any ideas? Why is Skydrive not reconciling the contents of local and cloud? Better to remove the laptop from the service, delete the folder and download instead of copying from the NAS? Surely this approach would not be a good one though, a lot cheaper to get content back from a local storage...

nathan

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#785907 23-Mar-2013 15:18

What does the task tray icon say?

billgates

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#785933 23-Mar-2013 15:34

Try this.

Right click on skydrive tray icon, then settings then choose folders, select any random folder to sync instead of all files/folders option. click ok etc to exit back to the desktop. go back and do the same process again and select all files/folders again, click ok to exit back to the desktop.

worked me when I had this picture folder giving me the same grief.

Do whatever you want to do man.

Ouranos

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#785964 23-Mar-2013 16:54

billgates: Try this.

Right click on skydrive tray icon, then settings then choose folders, select any random folder to sync instead of all files/folders option. click ok etc to exit back to the desktop. go back and do the same process again and select all files/folders again, click ok to exit back to the desktop.

worked me when I had this picture folder giving me the same grief.

Do not do this unless you want to download all of your files from the cloud!

Choosing to sync only selected folders will delete all other folders from the PC. Even if you immediately go back into the application and select all folders, you have a small window of opportunity before the folders are deleted - in the order of seconds. I know this because I did it today while trying to solve a different problem with SkyDrive (ie. downloading GB/day even when it says that all files are up to date).

There are numerous threads on your problem (and many others) on the Microsoft forum: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windowslive/forum/skydrive?auth=1&tab=all

The usual advice from Microsoft is to uninstall SkyDrive and then reinstall it. Apart from that, the support is utterly hopeless.

richms

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#785967 23-Mar-2013 17:14

I have given up on skydrive for file sync. Old mesh was great, new mesh was passable, but lacked XP support so I just left that machine off syncing and used a network share off a 7 machine running mesh.

Skydrive is just hopeless. So slow compared to mesh and it goes thru lots of traffic when the files are the same. Dropbox was a huge improvement, not too sure when my extra space on it runs out and needs to be paid for but I will be paying them since it seems to handle the same files arriving via USB stick much better than skydrive.

Richard rich.ms

freitasm

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#785978 23-Mar-2013 17:43

nathan: What does the task tray icon say?

Systray says it's all up-to-date. But they aren't as I have updated a .txt to test and those changes are not on the cloud version.

gehenna

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#785980 23-Mar-2013 17:47

Father in law had the same issue. Only fix was to uninstall and reinstall the app and resync.

freitasm

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#785998 23-Mar-2013 18:37

More and more... Bollocks.

Lenovo

Shop now for Lenovo laptops and other devices (affiliate link).

freitasm

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#786039 23-Mar-2013 19:45

This is stranger and stranger...

Left side is \Users\Mauricio Freitas\Skydrive\My Documents and right side is the same folder on Libraries:

Explorer shows the folder in sync if I browse to the folder. It shows the folder as in need of sync if I have it on a Open File dialog or in a Library.

Not happy.

Ouranos

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#786174 24-Mar-2013 08:52

In an attempt to fix my SkyDrive problem, three of the (many) things that I've tried are:

1. Compare the SkyDrive files on one PC with another. For me, there were three file differences: numerous desktop.ini files (ignored by SkyDrive, so OK); numerous thumbs.db files (also ignored by SkyDrive); and one old Excel xls file (c.2004) that had the same timestamp and file size on both PCs, but the compare program indicated that there were "binary differences". Therefore, I copied the file from one PC to the other and re-compared to ensure that they were the same. I used a free, open source program from winmerge.org to compare the two PCs.

2. Check that none of your files have invalid filenames and that all filenames are less than 254 characters long. I used a shareware program called "Delete invalid files" from http://www.purgeie.com/delinv/dldelinv.htm. It found one file with an invalid name, which I simply renamed.

3. Check that all of your files have valid timestamps. I used the freeware program Ultra File Search Lite from http://www.ultrafilesearch.com/download.html. A few of my files had timestamps that when listed by Ultra File Search Lite showed only a date but no time. In Windows Explorer they had both date and time, but all had times that were exact hours (ie. no minutes or seconds). I then overwrote their timestamps with the current time.

Previously SkyDrive was downloading almost 3 GB of data per day, even though only a few MB of files were changed. Today it has (so far) downloaded 248 MB but it has now stopped downloading. Perhaps that is just a coincidence, but maybe the various file fixes actually worked. Maybe.

freitasm

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#786177 24-Mar-2013 08:56

Thanks for the suggestions.

I think the problem in my installation is that Skydrive is actually synchronising files but incorrectly showing the file and folder icons as "need sync" instead of "sync done". As you can see from the screenshot above it shows different feedback to the user depending on how you are looking at the folder/file structure.

I have noticed that Windows 8 is a lot slower than Windows 7 to refresh a folder view. If you delete files in a folder on Windows 7 with a second explorer window open the change is reflected immediately. With Windows 8 it seems there's a delay for this refresh to happen. Perhaps Skydrive is having problems with this?

freitasm

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#787542 26-Mar-2013 20:36

Now I started seeing sync errors after editing Word documents.

So I removed ALL folders/files from My Documents under Skydrive, waited until they all disappeared from the skydrive online, unlinked the PC, deleted all folders/files in my local storage and linked the PC again.

The good thing is all folders/files show the files in sync now (the green tick). The bad thing is that it means uploading all my documents to Skydrive again.

There should be an easy way to restore Skydrive to a new PC install.