OneDrive shared folder syncing has been broken for months, with no fix in sight
winbuzzer.comWell, it’s not just them. Apple has had broke iCloud syncing on Windows for years. It almost seems purposely designed to make the Windows experience worse by frustrating users with missing files, permanently high CPU usage, etc.
OneDrive is sooo broken underneath. It should be a no-brainer to pick it, a sensible default, like Edge, but Microsoft always manages to fuck it up worse somehow.
It either just manages to work for you (count your blessings) or you'll have some cursed bit set in some forgotten Microsoft table somewhere that means you'll be doomed to a horrible experience forever without a clear cause. Infinitely (not) syncing folders, disappearing files, cryptic or vague error messages. Even on brand-new machines.
You thought the aim of the product was to manage your files in a way convenient to you.
The actual goal was to lock your enterprise into Microsoft cloud services.
Now that this goal has been achieved, support for the product has been wound down to the bare minimum required.
It's not even that.
Every megacorp fails at product engineering once things are "stable". The incentive goes away from teams investigating and fixing bugs and instead those teams shift to whatever new thing can get them promotions. Google is very known that problem, but it exists at all big corps.
Sharing a folder with my SO, and experienced this issue. Only workaround I found was to create an entirely new folder with a different name, and share that. That has been fine for a few months now.
But like come on, I'm actually paying for this. Yes it's just a part of the Office 365 plan, but it _is_ a part of it.
Actually was considering moving to self-hosting just last week. Any recommendations for a self-hosted Dropbox/OneDrive alternative besides NextCloud?
That depends, why "besides NextCloud"? Syncthing always gets a lot of traction here.
But what do you actually need to share? Folders? Or links to content? PDF? Archives?
Matrix homeservers and clients support most mime types in chat, including zip, so you can send anything and have it searchable in the chat as long as you maintain the matrix server.
Misskey has a "drive" feature, where all media you share goes, but you can also upload directly to it and link directly to media in the misskey drive.
Pastebins work, too. My github^ has the instructions on how to set up the same thing I run, an Up1 pastebin. I'm sure there's better.
But nextcloud has first class mobile clients, understands folders and mime types, can be synced over WebDAV, cifs, http, etc.
So... Up to you?
^ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genewitch/opensource/refs/...
Yeah know about Syncthing but it's "just" a sync tool. For my SO I would need something which a nice UI so it's easy to find what was shared, and I also want to be anle to share file links with others.
As for besides NextCloud, just to check my blind spot.
As i recommended to parent, buy a synology. It does everything both of you are talking about. If you're only trying to sync between computers, just use CIFS - \\192.168.0.5\sharename\ - in windows right click "this PC" on the left in an explorer window and "Map Network Drive". For cellphones, there's "DS" apps for all the features that the webUI exposes - File browser, audio player, surveillance (NVR is built in, or was), video system similar to plex/netflix but called DS video. and that's all "out of the box" - there's several dozen "addons" that are click-to-install.
and look, i am sure qnap and Aghyzzicgh from aliexpress might do this too, but i can't speak to them. I bought a synology on recommendation from a friend. My first one got hit by lightning (yes) and i had to buy a new NAS but the drives still work. i've replaced the original drives, but they still work. i installed one in my kid's machine to hold games. My current synology is a 4-bay dualcore with 2GB of ram.
it works perfectly for all this stuff. my phone automatically backs up photos to it when i connect to wifi, for example. If you put your syno on a public IP, you can hotlink to content on it. there may be ACL shenanigans, i have no idea. I don't use it that way.
why don't i use my synology that way?
Because i run a public nextcloud instance to be able to synchronize my photos and documents and hotlink them.
derp https://nextcloud.projectftm.com/index.php/s/synoscreenshot
+1 synology has been a surprisingly competent docker home server. I decided I wasn't interested in any of the services that require an account with them and was pleasantly surprised everything works fine without signing into any synology services. I thought about building something but I wasn't confident in any of the free NAS OS's on offer. Synology has a nice interface for managing users, containers, and sends me drive health reports on its own email address via SMTP. Low drama environment.
I love Immich [0] for photos, Jellyfin [1] works great for music and movies, just spun up a memos container for notes. For documents and stuff I would use dropbox for I just FTP into with Cyberduck or Filezilla.
I’ve only ever had corruption problems with nextcloud and syncthing. (And also with onedrive)
Do any of the options you listed work reliably?
Litmus test: sync a few million files totaling a few terabytes, including build output directories. Build a few projects on machine A a few times and run the unit tests (most services desync at this point). Perform a full sync of A and then machine B. Build on B. Repeat. Also, on both machines add non-overlapping files (like pictures, screenshots) to the same directory at the same time.
Yeah i use a synology for that. my public nextcloud has like 250GB of storage, which is plenty for 4 people to use it for photo backups and whatever else. If i need access to some random file on my network, i use tailscale - there are other options. i could buy/build an ipv6 router and use prefix delegation to get a public ipv6 on my synology.
You're looking for storage. Not sync. the clue was "terabytes". Wanna know where i draw the line? you can't sync terabytes to a phone.
I'm not trying to sound like a jerk. All of the things we mentioned are software based airquote "storage", dropbox, syncthing, etc. your original thing was "shared a folder with SO" which is why i asked what the folder was, mostly. Matrix will gag encrypting a TB of data. Misskey's drive defaults to like a gig per user.
Get a NAS, tailscale (or whatever, set up your own VPN with a fortigate or something), and now you rely on no-one but your ISP(s).
Proof that this works, just fine: https://imgur.com/a/q9hLDeH
note: I use both nextcloud (with a real domain name and certs and everything!) which is a VM on one of our machines in a DC. the synology is at my house. The synology backs up to a dedicated machine (it's in an air conditioned outbuilding with dedicated fiber pulls) with it's own redundant storage array, but that machine is "asleep" 99.9% of the time unless i'm pushing backups. My synology is not publicly accessible. It has ~30TB of storage, iirc.
note2: that youtube-rips is 90% <=480p, too!
The services I mentioned supposedly handle TB. I have a Synology, but partitioning my life into NFS and not-NFS is getting old. Also, I’d like e2ee sync, and not just e2ee backup.
I have a product idea that I troll my IT friends with.
A set of four thumb drives that sync to each other over their own WiFi network.
The ratio of works super duper to terrifies the IT staff is off the charts.
Well that wouldn't work because Wi-Fi is the wrong choice. Buuuuuuuut if you gave them cellular data plans? Now you're onto something. The Boron by particle comes to mind as a low cost dev option. The USB should let you talk to a computer as a flash drive, you can throw an SD card on/external to it for storage, and use the modem to sync to the others. As long as they're all on battery, should be fine.
Why? Generate some sort of peer to peer wlan, join up and sync away.
Because if you're within Wi-Fi range of each other, just use Wi-Fi to sync. The product would fail to sell
Microsoft needs to stop trying to make everything work with everything. It’s ends up meaning their stuff is always broken.
I use Box and am very happy with it. No Microsoft O365 issues. I use it across 2 Macs, an iPhone and an iPad.
I always find it amazing, ypy get core functionality that remains broken for months.
If you want a picture of the future, picture a stalled progress meter hanging in front of a human face, forever.
What progress meter? Infinite spinner is where it's at.