I’m a fan of Microsoft OneDrive. I have a corporate account, associated with Weston’s Office 365 account, as well as a personal account at home. I use it to keep files in sync between a variety of computers. Occasionally, it will decide it just wants to stop syncing all your files properly. This trick helped me, hope it will help you, too. 

First off, many of the sync errors I’ve run into in the past have been because of improper file naming. OneDrive, like its cousin SharePoint, have a more restrictive list of what characters can be used in the filename. You can see the list here. The list is more restrictive than what Windows 7 allows. If you make sure you avoid those characters, that will help your troubleshooting immensely. 

But there are some times where you’ll have a computer in your sync group that will decide it just does not want to play nice while the others do. When it comes to that, you’ll need to completely obliterate the locally stored cache and let OneDrive rebuild it. Note that this will completely kill your settings and files on your local computer for OneDrive, so I’d recommend copying the files out out of the OneDrive folder to somewhere else on your hard drive just to be safe. 

First off, close down all MS Office Applications (while this isn’t required from what I’ve seen, better safe than sorry). Then run task manager (right click on your taskbar and select “Start Task Manager”) and end the groove.exe, msouc.ece, and msosync.exe processes. Look in your system tray (the area by the clock) and make sure the Office Uploader and/or the OneDrive icons are no longer listed there (the orange circle with the arrow and the blue cloud, respectively).

Now remember, before doing the next steps, make sure you have copied out anything in your OneDrive folder that still needed to upload to the server, just to be safe.

Hit Windows-Key-R to bring up the Windows run dialog and paste in “C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\Spw” . That should open up a folder. Delete everything in that folder. Close that window out.

Hit Windows-Key-R again, and this time you want to go to “C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\15.0\OfficeFileCache”. Delete all the files in that folder as well.

After you’ve deleted everything, you can then restart OneDrive (though I’ve found it sometimes works better if you just reboot your computer to make sure all the required services and programs are loaded). When you reboot your computer and open up OneDrive again, it will run you through the setup process again, and you should be syncing again in no time.

Hat Tip to Alexander Vanwynsberghe for the tip.

Update on 10/28/14: Speaking of OneDrive, it now comes with unlimited storage. Weston Technlogy Solutions is an Office 365 partner. Sign up for a free trial today.