Can SkyDrive truly sync data without tagging it by computer?

Question

For three months this summer, I was away from my personal network and I accessed my SkyDrive folder from my MacBook Pro, making occasional changes to certain projects. The main SkyDrive files live on my Windows desktop where I sync to and from the SkyDrive account.

When I returned back to my local network, turned on my desktop and synced up Skydrive to my 3 month old files on my desktop, it did download all the changes. However, with the files which were changed, it didn't just overwrite them.

I opened one of my project folders and saw it littered with a bunch of new files. For example, I made a change on the index.php file. After the sync was done, I saw both a file called index.php and index-PC1.php, where PC1 is the name of my desktop account with SkyDrive. I didn't want to see a bunch of files tagged with PC1 but now they are in all these project folders which I regularly sync with Github.

Is there a way to change this setting on SkyDrive? I'd prefer for the sync just happen with these duplicated files tagged with the account name.

Answer 1

I received this answer from the Microsoft Answer forums.

The behavior you are seeing is how SkyDrive handles simultaneous changes in files that don't fully get synced to the cloud. It is currently not possible to configure this behavior via a setting. We will consider that feedback when planning our future releases.

In order to resolve your current issue, please delete all the files you no longer want on your PC and make sure that the files no longer appear on the SkyDrive website. Once you have done that please rename the files on the PC to their desired names, that change should propagate to your Mac.

In order to avoid this issue in the future, it would be best to do the following:

1. Before leaving the PC for a prolonged period, ensure that all the files in it are synced and up to date (there should be a green check mark on their containing folder).
2. Exit SkyDrive or disconnect your computer only after ensuring that the files are up to date.

We suspect what happened was that there were some edits / changes on the PC that were not fully synced to the cloud before you left for vacation and shut down SkyDrive / exited the computer. After you made the updates on the Mac and restarted SkyDrive on the PC, we did not know which of the two changes took precedence and so in order to avoid data loss, we preserved both files (i.e. changes on the PC and changes on the Mac).