Skydrive no longer syncing, makes duplicate files

[The Visitor]

Hello all,

Before installing Windows 8.1 anything that I put into my Skydrive folder (I had the desktop app) were automatically synced to Skydrive.com as well as my Android phone app, and anything I uploaded from my phone app were synced to Skydrive.com and were automatically downloaded to my Skydrive folder. Now my phone app and Skydrive.com still work fine, but the Skydrive folder does not. That is, nothing gets downloaded to my Skydrive folder and nothing gets uploaded to Skydrive.com from it.

I've tried different settings for it, I've tried offline only, online only, I've toggled settings in the Settings app, and nothing.

Something else that happens is that now there are duplicates of all of the files in the My Documents folder. Say that my PC is named Smith-PC. Now, for example, there is a file called Random Document.docx and Random Document-Smith-PC.docx. And this is for every single file in the My Documents folder. Furthermore, only the version with the Smith-PC in the name works. When I open the normally named file, I get an error:

"An unexpected error is keeping you from copying the file. If you continue to receive this error, you can use the error code to search for help with this problem. Error 0x80070490: Element not found."

This is really annoying and now I have duplicates of all of my documents, half of which won't open and the other half which are named wrong with Smith-PC at the end of all of them. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[chev65]

This appears to be an ongoing problem with Windows 8.1 though it may help to Go into the Sky Drive metro app, and access the settings from the Charm bar. (Charm Bar -> Settings -> Options) The only option is to "access all files offline" which may help sync the files.

The threads on this problem go on forever so it may be server problem on Msoft's end.
Windows 8.1 SkyDrive not syncing - Microsoft Community

 

[The Visitor]

Well, that caused it to sync all right, but it only synced the ones that didn't have duplicates (there are a few files which weren't duplicated for some reason). The vast majority which had duplicates remain unsynced. *sigh*, so Skydrive creates duplicates for all of my files, then proceeds to neglect all of those when syncing. Great job Microsoft .

Anyways, thanks for the reply I guess. +repped. Now I have to go through my hundreds, maybe thousands of documents and manually delete all of the ones that won't open, as well as rename all of the ones that do work to not have the dumb Smith-PC at the end anymore. The old app worked just fine MS...

 

[Rivermonster]

I have exactly the same issue. Have completely lost faith in the robustness of SkyDrive and am considering alternatives.

 

[Rivermonster]

I have found a way to remove all the corrupt files if it helps...
First, I noticed that the good files only have the "A" (archive) file attribute set whereas the corrupt files have "HSAPLO" set. After a bit of digging around I found this site that tells you what these attribute letters stand for:
Attrib - Edit file attributes | SS64.com
There is a value associated with each attribute (e.g. H is 32). For HSAPLO I calculated the value is 5670.
Now comes the nice bit. In File Explorer, go to the topmost affected folder and CTRL F to open the Search options. Then in the searchbox enter "attributes:5670" without the quotes. The search will return all the corrupt files that have the HSAPLO attribute settings. So you can select all of them and delete them in one go! Hopefully, that will save other poor souls who have this issue a lot of work.
It still leaves all the non-corrupt files with computer name suffixes that you don't want, but I think there will be batch renaming tools that can help with this, like Renamer for example.
Adrian