"Not Allowed" Issue with OneDrive

Troubleshooting
1

Hello Forum,

I’m new with ODrive, so I encountered an issue today, which even after reading some posts here and on google, I can’t seem to get over.

Firstly, let me say that this is one of the greatest tools I’ve ever worked with!! Keep up the good work!

Now, moving on to the problem. I have a shared folder (someone shared it with me, but I have “Edit” permissions) in my OneDrive account. Opening and viewing files in ODrive (on my desktop) works perfectly, but I tried to add a new folder and I keep receiving the “Not Allowed” Error, which tells me that “The file is locked on Microsoft OneDrive”. But what does this actually mean?

It can’t seem to be a permission error, as I have the “Edit” permission.

Do you maybe have some ideas?

Thank you very much in advance.

Best regards,
Richard

2

Hi Richard, if you click on the message it should give you a description of why it is not being allowed. Often times with OneDrive it seems to be illegal characters in the file and/or folder names.

3

@Eric Hi, thanks for your reply. So, as I was saying in the original post, when I click on the Not Allowed Message it says “File is locked on OneDrive”.

So what could this be?

Thanks,
Richard

4

Ahh, yes. This issue…

This stems from a historic problem with the way OneDrive provided (limited) access to the shared folder via their API. We should revisit this though, since there are some things that have changed in their unified API. I’ve made a dev note to follow-up.

For now, unfortunately, it is not possible to add/edit files inside a OneDrive shared folder, even if you have the proper perms.

5

@Tony Thanks Tony for the info. This is really unfortunate, but let’s just say it’s “Microsoft”, always making things complicated.

If it’s taken into consideration than it is good, and maybe this feature will be available in a future update.

Thank you again!

Best regards,
Richard

6

Do me a favor and ping me again on this in a little while. I want to make sure we revisit this. Just need to carve out some time to do so. :slightly_smiling:

1 Like
7

I will absolutely. Thanks again.

Best regards,
Richard

8

Just bumping this thread as a reminder @Tony !

9

I think there is more to it than just Shared folders. I’m getting this error on non-shared files.I went to the Onedrive web client and the files in question give me a warning about not being able to scan. I have to click a checkbox to proceed.

Clearly a security measure but the question is if the OneDrive API allows these files to download.

10

I am having the same issues as @Josh_Titley
It happened to be an msi file for me on a non-shared file.

11

Hi @Andrew_Blankenship,
Can you post a screenshot of what you are seeing please?

Thanks!

12

Hi Tony.

Earlier today, I’ve tried to upload about 300 GB of data to my OneDrive account (1TB personal account obtained with my Office 365 subscription) using odrive. Unfortunately, it didn’t really work as expected. I came back a few hours later and checked on the status of the upload: only 4% was completed, about 15 GB, and I had almost a hundred files in the “Not Allowed” category. The syncing process was not entirely stalled, but it obviously wasn’t working well at all.

Since then, I’ve run several upload tests using various browsers, with the idea of going back to using odrive once the initial large upload is done.

Chrome is supposed to be the most flexible browser to use with OneDrive because it allows folder uploads. However, in my (limited) experience, it doesn’t work well at all: the upload process stalls quite often and Chrome asks me to reload the OneDrive page several times per session.

Safari works much better: it doesn’t support folder uploads, but it’s much more reliable, it doesn’t stall and it’s rather fast.

Are you aware of any issues with odrive and OneDrive that would make uploading a large number of files a problem? In particular as it relates to the “Not Allowed” issue?

I’ve dropped up to 1k files on the Safari window and uploaded them without any problem using the browser interface. Yet odrive was unable to upload even a portion of those files without hitting numerous “Not Allowed” issues and almost grinding to a halt.

Given my Chrome misadventures, I don’t think odrive is the only OneDrive client that has problems dealing with the service, but it would be nice to know if those issues are common and if you’re able to reproduce them so that you can work on a fix.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards.

13

Hi @dadaix,
If you click on the items in the “not allowed” list, a pop-up will be displayed telling you why it was not allowed. Can you take a look at that and tell me what it says, or take a screenshot of it?

Thanks!

14

Hello Tony.

I’ve used Safari to do most of the uploads, while keeping just a half-dozen large files (180 MB to 900 MB) unsynced to be able to retry syncing them with odrive.

However, even with the bulk of the files already uploaded, I am still having problems with odrive and OneDrive when syncing those large files: odrive will get to 99%-100% (yes, sometimes, the upload gets to 100%, and yet the file ends up in the “Waiting” category), then stall, then switch the files to the “Waiting” category, “to be auto-retried later”, or temporarily to the “Not Allowed” category, before treating them once again like “Waiting” files.

Smaller files, in the 40-60 MB range, do experience the same kind of “stalling/waiting”, but not systematically (some get uploaded successfully at once), and when they do, they usually get through on the second try.

I don’t get a pop-up when I select a file in the “Not Allowed” category, though. So I can’t provide you with any more details about the issue. Except to add that odrive gets into an endless sync loop: it retries to upload, stalls at 99-100%, switches the file to “Waiting” (or alternatively to “Not Allowed”), then retries the next file, fails again, etc. It’s been going on for the better part of an hour now. odrive keeps juggling those three large files around over and over again. Here is a screen shot of the odrive menu when I select a Not Allowed file (no pop-up in sight):

Screen Shot 2016-11-05 at 09.32.12.png1068×194 88.6 KB

To make you feel better, let me repeat that I am getting similar errors when trying to use Chrome to upload files to OneDrive: it will try to sync three files at a time and that will work for a time, but then two out of the three uploads will appear to stall (anywhere from 1% to 99%, so that’s different from odrive’s @99-100% failures), with just one proceeding normally, and then, when that one is done, sometimes one of the stalled uploads will proceed to the end successfully, or a new one will start at normal speed. Unfortunately, eventually, all three uploads stall (again, anywhere from 1% to 99%) and Chrome then asks me to “Reload” the OneDrive page due to an unspecified error. So there is obviously something wrong with the way some clients deal with OneDrive, and since that includes Chrome, odrive is in good company.

Safari, however, works much better: the upload process will slow down over time and doing more than 1k-1.5k files at a time is not a good idea, but the uploads won’t stall as they do in Chrome or odrive. And when that happens, reloading the OneDrive page restores the normal upload speed for another large batch of files. Here is a screen shot of Safari having successfully and concurrently uploaded those three large files that proved so difficult to handle for odrive:

Screen Shot 2016-11-05 at 09.56.27.png590×774 25 KB

I hope you’ll be able to make sense of it. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards.

15

Hi @dadaix,
Thanks for the details.

It is odd that you do not get a pop-up when selecting an item in not allowed. It does sound like OneDrive is throwing some exceptions of some sort, though. If you send a diagnostic from the odrive tray menu I can take a closer look at some debug info and hopefully figure out why OneDrive is giving you so much trouble.

Thanks!

16

Hi @Tony .

I’m in the process of making odrive and OneDrive “choke” on a couple of large files (200 MB or so). The first one has already gone from 100% to waiting. As soon as the second one does the same I’ll fire up the diagnostic and send it your way.

You should really let odrive generate user-readable log files so that we can better help you track down that kind of issues. As it is, I can only describe to you what I see: when the upload is complete or almost complete, the process seems to stall and time out before OneDrive can confirm the file is indeed there (and Chrome is much less patient than odrive when the upload stalls before it gives up, reports an error, and asks me to reload the OneDrive’s web page). Apparently, the larger the file, the more likely the problem to occur.

But I can’t offer you any more insight than that.

In any case, you should really look at the way Safari handles OneDrive: it’s obviously doing something right.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards.

P.S. I’ve sent to you two diagnostics at 5 minutes interval, involving the same three files, so that you can see the problem at work: in the first report, all three files were stuck in the syncing loop; in the second report, one of the files has been successfully uploaded and only two remain…

17

Thanks for the info!

We plan to offer a sync log that endusers can reference as a future enhancement. Believe me, I really want this :wink:

As for your upload issues, I am seeing some odd behavior from OneDrive. Primarily in two ways:

  1. OneDrive is not returning the data it is supposed to after upload, causing us to mark the upload as a failure. When a file is uploaded, OneDrive is supposed to - as per their spec - return the file name and size, among other things. These appear to be missing for some of your attempted uploads. We mark it as a failure and retry.

  2. We finish sending the file and OneDrive doesn’t respond with a “success” message for a long time, causing us to break the connection.

These are only 200MB files you are attempting to upload?
Are these files you need access to on mobile or could they be candidates for using IFS (file splitting)?

18

Hi @Tony.

To answer your question, I need to be able to access those files on my iPad, so I can’t split them up.

When uploading files below 50 MB in size to OneDrive, odrive seems to succeed at once most of the time. Between 50 MB and 100 MB, it may take a second try. Above 100 MB, OneDrive will usually fail to confirm the upload in time and a loop will start, usually endless (odrive will sometimes upload the file successfully after several tries, but there is no rule, and I’d say it fails 90-95% of the time). In other words, it’s not a working solution.

Chrome is subject to the same issues, but is even less patient than odrive when OneDrive stalls. It reports an error and forces a “reload” of the OneDrive page to continue.

Safari seems to be the most reliable client for now. Sometimes, uploads are (or become) terribly slow in Safari too, but it won’t quit, and a restart of the browser will usually let me resume speedy and successful uploads.

So for now I’m just uploading new files manually using Safari.

I think the way to fix this issue is to either work around OneDrive’s flaws (and maybe get Microsoft to fix its service) or find out how Safari manages to handle the uploads successfully almost all the time and mimic its behavior.

Maybe there is a way to force OneDrive to report in time whether or not the upload has succeeded?

As it is, odrive simply can’t be used with OneDrive to sync “large” files (though 50-100 MB is not really that “large”), which is really too bad :frowning:. I hope you’ll be able to fix that issue sooner rather than later.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards.

19

Hi @dadaix,
We have a couple of ideas on how to try to mitigate OneDrive’s less than desirable behavior in this area.

It sounds like you have a fairly good workaround, currently, with Safari. Hopefully you don’t have these size files too often, because I know that can be a real pain to resort to that all the time.

I plan to reach out to OneDrive about the missing response information, too. Hopefully they can shed some light on this.

20

Hi @Tony.

Unfortunately, all the files I store on OneDrive fall in the 30MB-1GB range. So manual uploads through Safari are apparently the only viable option for now.

Some more observations: sometimes, a Safari upload will be extremely slow from the very start and will never recover a normal upload speed, no matter what I do. Usually, in that case, even restarting the application and restarting the upload won’t help: it will always be very slow. The only thing that works in that case is using Chrome once to upload that file to OneDrive. Usually, the upload speed is ok for that upload and then if I go back to Safari uploads will be fast once again. The reverse is also true: failed or extremely slow uploads started in Chrome can’t be salvaged in that application, but switching to Safari will succeed.

In other words, I just can’t make sense out of the way OneDrive works: it’s just completely inconsistent. One would be justified in coining a phrase like “OneDrive voodoo” to describe it.

I’ve read everything I could on the web about the service and there seem to be no solution to the issues people are having with it. And that’s usually from Windows 10 users, so apparently using Windows doesn’t improve the situation one bit. OneDrive just seem to suck. Period. Which is kind of strange coming from the new Microsoft, which is supposed to be all about Azure and the cloud these days. But then again OneDrive is not Azure…

In a month of testing, Amazon Cloud Drive has been working perfectly for me, and odrive is the best “sync” client I’ve tried with it, by far. Uploads and downloads are fast and flawless.

I’ve been a Dropbox customer for 4 years now and the service has always worked very well. I can’t use odrive with it for now because I want to retain creation and modification dates, but there is no serious issue between odrive and that service. Just details.

But OneDrive is just terrible…

Right now, I’m trying to use the native OneDrive Mac OS X client to see if I can get it to sync my data successfully, i.e. upload large files successfully. I’ll let you know how it turns out, but I’m not hopeful: the client has been “processing changes” since 8 A.M. this morning, almost four hours ago, and is not done yet. So I don’t even know if it will consider the local and the cloud data to be in sync. I hope so. According to Activity Monitor, it has processed 270 GB out of 408 GB of locally stored data (that’s what the disk activity of the OneDrive application tells me: there is no way to know what the client is doing directly). Once the 408 GB have been processed, I hope it will be ready to sync. And I’ll run some tests.

Good luck with your own attempts to work around those OneDrive issues in odrive. I really hope you’ll succeed.

Best regards.

Edit: the OneDrive client having finally finished its “processing”, I’ve tried syncing about 900 MB of new local data, ranging from 40 MB to 150 MB per file, and it worked, although the upload rate got progressively worse, starting at around 12 MB/s and ending around a measly 50 KB/s. Nevertheless, even if it means using yet another native client, I now have a working option to sync data to OneDrive. So that’s good…