How I Solved OneDrive Forever “Processing Changes”

Whoever thought that a persistently crashing video game could actually be helpful?!

One of the features of Microsoft’s OneDrive app in Windows 10 is that it can backup your Documents folder. It does this, not by, as you’d’ve thought, backing up the C:\Users\<Username>\Documents folder to a part of OneDrive, but by changing all the links to C\Users\<Username>\Documents to C:\Users\<Username>\OneDrive\Documents!

This apparently can cause issues with some PC games like The Elder Scrolls Online (according to an admin on their forums) and as a lot of games tend to make a folder in your documents to store their saves, this means that OneDrive is forever syncing changes to these files.

I’ve been having an issue ever since I reinstalled Windows a while ago, where Onedrive would get stuck “Processing ##,### Changes.” I tried resetting OneDrive, but no luck. After trying to launch ESO though, and having it crash while trying to log me in ( I assume somewhere in the game’s code they have multiple differing definitions for their save games folder), I went searching for a solution.

A common solution I found repeated in a few places was to make changes to the registry, so I checked what the values were in my registry and sure enough, instead of pointing to my local Documents, it was set to OneDrive\Documents.

Why Microsoft? Why couldn’t you just do it properly? Why did you have to make such an esoteric change to the OS and not mention it anywhere? Didn’t it occur to you that not every program that reads from the Documents folder is going to work with your app? And that not every write to the Documents folder is required to be “backed up”, or will be compatible with your chosen method of syncing files?

So ultimately, the solution to both my ESO crash and OneDrive Sync issues was to disable the Documents back-up feature of OneDrive, remove the PC game folders from OneDrive online and move them locally to the real Documents folder, then restart OneDrive and wait for it to re-process all of the nearly 20,000 files I have stored there legitimately.

Yours Frustratingly,
– Raingram