I am experiencing some issues with odrive and the OneDrive storage provided by my company (1 TB with the Microsoft 365 account).
In the past couple of weeks I am continuously prompted to authorize odrive access to my account, while previously this was only going on on a yearly basis or so
More worrying, I just witnessed the disappearance of almost all entries in the OneDrive “Shared with me” folder. By chance I had Explorer open on that folder and suddenly eveything but three files and one folder (which by the way were shared outside of my organization) disappeared. I was scared but in fact if a go on the OneDrive website everything is still there; instead, on the odrive website no trace of it.
I just created an odrive log to check.
Are you aware of any possible cause, and how I can retrieve syncing of odrive client to the "Shared with me” folder?
For item 2.: The logs are showing that the items are no longer available to Odrive. It is asking for the listing and it is returning without those items, so it sees it as a remote to local delete. You can see this in the sync activity log.
Ex: 31 Oct 06:28:50PM INFO Successful Delete Folder (Remote to Local) for Item: D:\odrive\BACKUP\Shared With Me\1_FedericoESC
Sure thing, that’s the point. When I first saw them disappear I thought something might have gone wrong elsewehere but on the OneDrive web client they still show up there:
Situation on the odrive web app is consistent with what the client does locally.
Just for clarity, the screenshot in the OneDrive web app does not have the complete list, there’s a couple of items on top which didn’t fit the screen (and those are two of the four items shown by odrive).
I haven’t been able to reproduce this. Is there any difference that you can discern from the items that are showing up vs the items that are not showing up?
in fact yes. The four items which are still seen by odrive were shared from outside my organization.
All the folders and files shared by other people from my organization disappeared from odrive (but are still visible in OneDrive). I see it in the activities tab of OneDrive.
I have tested this with sharing between users in the same organization on our own account and the shares are showing up correctly. We also haven’t received any other reports of this.
Perhaps there was some setting that was changed within your Org that is preventing access to shared items by third party software, or something to that effect?
As a test, can you verify the following?
If a coworker shares something new with you, does it show-up?
If an external account shares something new with you, does it show-up?
I tested both. Indeed, both new folders (from outside and inside the organization) now show up.
I have a problem in accessing files on the external one, but I think it is related to uncorrect permissions - in fact, odrive and OneDrive both show them.
One possibility is therefore to simply ask my coworkers to renew the share, but I will also inquire my IT department about that. Thanks for your support.
I asked my collaborators to repeat the creation of a newly shared folder, and now it can’t be seen at all in odrive - even the new one.
In OneDrive, now it works like this:
I receive an email notifying me of the share
clicking on it, I can access the folder with the OneDrive web client - but that would open in a space which my colleague’s space
I can click to add a link to the shared folder in My files
the new folder does not show up (as it previously did, and as the folders created before the change still do) in the Shared section of Onedrive web client, but instead it appears as a link in the MyFiles section
odrive cannot see the newly shared folder at all
I hope you can find a solution, or I will have to reinstall the official OneDrive client to access my organization shares - that would be really painful, as the odrive client is SO much better.
It was working, but then disappeared after sharing the same link again? Are you still seeing the external items? Can you share some additional details on the flow/sequencing? I don’t fully understand.
To clarify what we are doing: We are listing what is returned from Microsoft when querying for “Shared with me” items. Unfortunately we don’t have any control beyond that and it sounds like Microsoft is doing something strange with the shared items in your account/Org.
Additionally, Microsoft’s API doesn’t expose the shortcuts to these items in the My Files section, so there isn’t a way for us to see them.
Originally everything was working fine. Folders shared by people in my organization were appearing in the Shared with me section, together with those shared from the outside. odrive was correctly syncing with that folder.
At some time a few days ago every folder shared by other colleagues in my organization disappeared from odrive, leaving only the external ones. Meanwhile, in the OneDrive web space I can still see everything.
When you asked me to test new shares, both internally and externally, I asked a collaborator to share a new folder, and the new one was visible as usual among the “Shared with me” items.
Seeing that as a possible solution, I asked my colleagues to cancel sharing for our shared folders and re-share them, but to no avail. Onedrive still shows the folder as being shared from the original date, and it doesn’t show up in odrive.
We tried again with a new shared folder, thinking of a worst case scenario in which we would just move files from the old to the new one. However, only a couple of hours later the previous attempt, the newly shared folder is also not visible anymore in “Shared with me”.
Moreover, it is not showing up in the Shared sections of the OneDrive web client. What I can do now (both for the old and new folders) is to click on the Add link to my files button to create a link to the shared folder in the My files section of the OneDrive web client. Unfortunately, these links are not seen by odrive.
Now it would seem there is no way for me to sync to those shared folders locally using odrive.
This is very strange behavior. Microsoft does tend to have a fair amount of latency with some of its operations. It may be that what is being provided via the API is cached/out-of-date, so we can see if anything changes in the next couple of hours.
I think it may also be beneficial to have your colleague create a couple of new shares that are different than anything that was shared before to see if those behave differently.
Questions:
Are the external shares still showing-up in Odrive, or is now “Shared With Me” completely empty?
Do any of your colleagues use Odrive? If so, are they seeing the same behavior?
not sure if it’s Microsoft or a change in how my organization handles shares within the Microsoft/Sharepoint framework. Certainly something has changed for everybody (talking about the OneDrive web client here now):
previously, folders shared internally would appear in the Shared with me section of OneDrive (in fact it was very difficult getting rid of them)
now, the shared folders are visualized in the OneDrive space of the owner; you have the option of adding a link to those folders that appears in the My files section of OneDrive, but as a link and not as a proper folder
Coming to your questions:
In the Shared with me folder now I only see the folders shares from outside my organization, as per the screenshot posted above
Nope. I advertise odrive a lot, but I have to say that since my organization gives 1 TB of storage on OneDrive most colleagues rely on that alone.
I personally don’t like OneDrive (the Microsoft 365 business version at least) for several reasons:
It has some limitations in storage; for example, at some point I tried to move everything from my 20GB Dropbox there. It didn’t work, because eventually I found out that there was a limit of 20,000 files after which the client stopped syncing (without obviously notifying the user); at the time I had a couple of projects with thousands of small files, and I got stuck
While syncing with GDrive and Dropbox always runs smoothly, syncing with OneDrive often leads to errors and if the file is large and the connection not super steady I must try and retry several times before syncing
Sometimes I run into similar issues even using the web client, therefore I’m certain it’s not odrive, it’s the platform which is not as reliable
That’s why now I have this situation:
25 GB on Dropbox which I use for hot work storage (the projects I’m currently working on)
17 GB of Google Drive for personal use
1 TB on OneDrive which I use as cold storage, as an additional backup layer in addition to physical backup copies (two in two different places)
odrive for me is very precious because I can use a single client to sync all three. Morever, should I need more space, I can just create a new Gmail account account and get extra space.
However, the standard 2GB that come with Dropbox are often too little and obviously people are not using their own Google Drive allowance for work. Having a single storage space to link to for work, they use the official client.
I found out that, when somebody in my organization shares a single file with me, it appears normally in the “Shared with me” folder. I now receive an email with the link to the file, possibly with a password, and then after accessing the file on OneDrive it is there. The same thing does not happen for shared folders.
Additional bit of info: my ICT service says that they didn’t make any change internally, therefore it must be something done on Microsoft side. They’re also saying that since odrive is not officially supported, they are not following up on this issue.
I’ve been testing Microsoft’s sharing, and it really seems like there is something fundamentally wrong with it:
New items shared sometimes will show-up in Microsoft’s web view Shared With Me section, but not always. There can also be a large delay before things show-up, if they ever do.
Some things that are returned in the API response are not visible via Microsoft’s web view and vice versa.
I have seen some things show-up in the API response one day and then not the next.
I am still investigating to see if there is anything else we can try or alternate API we can use to try to supplement the data, but Microsoft seems to have some deeper issues here…
