Frequently Asked Questions

You might want to try resetting your OneDrive profile to see if this resolves the issue.  This will reset OneDrive and force it to re-evaluate the sync status on all files.

Note that if there are discrepancies between file versions in the cloud and local versions, you will need to resolve any sync conflicts when prompted after this process completes.

1. Open a command prompt with elevated privileges by searching for "CMD" in the search bar on the Windows 10 taskbar.
2. Right click on the Command Prompt app and choose "Run as Administrator".
3. Say yes when prompted to allow app to make changes to your device.
4. Copy and paste the following command and press enter: %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\onedrive.exe /reset
5. This will cause your OneDrive icon to disappear from the task bar.
6. Wait about two minutes then search for OneDrive as you did CMD above.
7. Click on the One Drive App in the search results.
8. This will relaunch the app and it will begin reprocessing all changes.

How long this takes will depend upon how much data is in your OneDrive and how much data is in any SharePoint sites that you sync to your desktop.

You should be able to continue working while it is doing this though.

Your issue might actually be a usage behavior issue as well and not an issue with One Drive itself.

There are some important things to be aware of when working with Microsoft 365 documents within a desktop Windows environment.

Any file accessed by your device through any sort of file modification activity such as copying, moving, renaming, etc will be automatically synced between your computer and the One Drive or SharePoint cloud store that the file actually resides. There are two ways to interact with files on SharePoint and One Drive. Up to date Microsoft Office applications are aware of this and offer two subtly different ways of accessing files. In the screen shot below you will see that Word has several options for saving a copy of a file. The top two are directly to One Drive or SharePoint. This does not update the local copy of the file on the PC, but updates/saves it directly to One Drive or SharePoint in the cloud. If the file happens to be synced to your device, then it will trigger a syncing of the changes through the Desktop One Drive app down to the device.



There are a few things to bear in mind when working with files that are cloud based (files that reside in the cloud but not on your device) or cloud synced (files that reside in the cloud but are synced to your device.

1. All file modifications made to files in the cloud will trigger some sort of activity with One Drive for SharePoint locations and One Drive folders that are synced with Windows Explorer.
2. There are two types of sync activities that One Drive performs: Updating Changes and Syncing Files
3. Updating Changes should not impact CPU that heavily as this is just One Drive simply acknowledging that something has changed in the cloud version of the files.
4. The actual sync process is where you may see higher impact from One Drive depending upon several factors.

When moving, copying or renaming files and folders you should consider the best location to perform such a process based upon the number of files and the total size of all files that you are modifying.

If you are moving/copying files or renaming a folder that has a large amount of data and/or number of files within it, it might be best to perform such an action from the One Drive or SharePoint web interface instead of Windows Explorer.
This is especially true if many of those files are not currently synced to your device (have a cloud status icon) because by attempting to manipulate them from your device you will trigger an automatic sync of all the effected files to your device.



Both the SharePoint and One Drive web interfaces have a similar navigation scheme to them.  See the two attached images.

For more about moving files with SharePoint visit: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/move-or...

Moving or copying files between One Drive and SharePoint: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/move-fi...

Syncing files between OneDrive/SharePoint and a desktop should be avoided for files that are continually being updated.  Examples are database files such as Outlook .PST files that Outlook has open during an active Outlook session.  You should import your PST data into the cloud via Outlook and let Exchange deal with syncing it instead of having an open PST file in Outlook that is stored in a OneDrive or SharePoint folder.  This is the same issue as with having active PSTs on mapped network drives of local servers.  It causes problems.