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Skydrive Upload / Download Pending

john.calixte

New Member
Hello,

Skydrive on both my desktop (8.1) and my RT (8.1) consistently gets "stuck" syncing files. For example, when I drop files into my desktop Skydrive folders the upload process get stuck at "pending". Similarly when my RT is syncing (downloading) new files on Skydrive (because I have "make available offline" selected) it gets stuck at "pending".

The clunky workaround is to restart the Skydrive app in Task Manager which seems to kickstart the upload or download. However depending on the number of files several restarts may be required. Very cumbersome!

I believe this problem started with a recent Tuesday update and not the 8.1 upgrade, but I'm not 100% sure about that. I haven't seen other threads on this and I'm wondering if others are experiencing this issue too. Thanks all.
 

kristalsoldier

Well-Known Member
Yes, I noticed this happening once yesterday. I killed the pending upload and restarted the SkyDrive app. But the problem seems to have disappeared for now.
 

hotphil

Member
Check Microsoft's site - there's dozens of threads, SkyDrive in 8.1 is very, very broken. Some have had joy by booting into safe mode and deleting the local SkyDrive folder and letting it all download again.

For me, any changes to Office files that are in SkyDrive just tells me that the server copy has been updated by someone else at a time that's 8 hours ahead of my timezone. No idea where it's getting the timestamp from (I'm in UTC +8, so adding on another 8 hours is totally invalid).
 

Rvacha

Member
This issue is ages old and one of the reasons I no longer use SkyDrive. Try placing 40,000 files on it - you are statistically guaranteed to have problems. And this is NOT a Win8.1 issue, it is a SkyDrive problem. With enough files and enough time you'll learn that MS is doing some content inspection even though they say they don't - some files will be listed as undergoing review (or something to that effect, I can't recall the exact wording). One of the most aggravating aspects was that OneNote files had a propensity to get "stuck", sometimes for days. You'd think they could handle that much
 

oion

Well-Known Member
This issue is ages old and one of the reasons I no longer use SkyDrive. Try placing 40,000 files on it - you are statistically guaranteed to have problems. And this is NOT a Win8.1 issue, it is a SkyDrive problem. With enough files and enough time you'll learn that MS is doing some content inspection even though they say they don't - some files will be listed as undergoing review (or something to that effect, I can't recall the exact wording). One of the most aggravating aspects was that OneNote files had a propensity to get "stuck", sometimes for days. You'd think they could handle that much

Really? In personal use, that'd be impossible for me. I'm pretty sure I've never had 40k files in total throughout my life. Corporate use--I'd hope SkyDrive Pro is a lot more robust with multiple users and thus potentially thousands of files. Honestly, I think an extremely miniscule number of users would run into problems based on that quantity saturation. The average user will have hundreds of files but 40k? Heh. Buy your own server or use remote login to your data drives. A third party subscription cloud service would not be at the top of my list for that amount of data, especially if you're paranoid about snooping.

Now, if a single share from OneNote or any other Office application got stuck and you wanted to sync a doc to your workstation, that's definitely something to worry about.
 
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john.calixte

john.calixte

New Member
Interesting. I've been sharing Office files (especially OneNote) with SkyDrive across devices almost every working day for about a year now and never had a single issue. It was only when I started uploading a few hundred books and magazines and tagged them as "available offline" that I started having problems. This coincidentally was the same time that I upgraded to Win8.1. Perhaps I mistakenly assumed it was a Win8.1 issue.
 

Omni

Active Member
I do have a few problems with SkyDrive but there few and far between. I do have more problems with uploading new files than anything else though. This happens on Windows 7 and 8 so I do think its a SkyDrive issue as opposed to Windows.
 

Ruffles

Active Member
I've also had issues with Skydrive and had to resort to jumping through hoops to fix it. I really dislike the integration in 8.1. We need something that allows us to force sync and better error reporting so that when it does get stuck, we can figure out why.
 

oion

Well-Known Member
I've also had issues with Skydrive and had to resort to jumping through hoops to fix it. I really dislike the integration in 8.1. We need something that allows us to force sync and better error reporting so that when it does get stuck, we can figure out why.

Keep poking Microsoft about it. The official MS boards are a good place to start. Seriously, until more people report problems to official channels, their products and services aren't going to improve and/or it's going to be harder to find where bugs are nesting. More data points are good. When you run into a problem, try to remember every single step you took, if anything else was running in the background (like downloading video that takes up bandwidth), the types of files that are stuck, and so on; I did UAT/QA before and tech support appreciates it when you have as much detail as possible, even if there isn't a good immediate fix, because it'll help track down issue sources.

SkyDrive - Microsoft Community

I never initiated the free 200GB SkyDrive with my Surface and keep my file volume quite low; the only time I saw a stuck pending was, I think, after a patch and reboot (forgot SkyDrive was running). Deleting the source file fixed that problem, and it seems others have to resort to deleting the entire folder to start over. There is a troubleshooter available from MS but I don't think it can run on WinRT.
 

hotphil

Member
There are some log files stored away somewhere. And it's not just a Surface or WinRT problem. I need all my SkyDrive available offline, so after each reboot on any 8.1 device I have to go and switch that toggle back on again as it just disables itself during a reboot. And I've sadly had to resort to a complete deletion/re-sync on my 8.1 laptop at least once a week as it gets files stuck for days in the "pending" status. And it's not like I use it to store any dynamic data - just some photos and Office files.
Never had any problems with it prior to 8.1, it was rock-solid. Now they've really broken it.
 
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