OneDrive for MacOS hangs with "Preparing to upload"

Question

My OneDrive for Mac stalled uploading/syncing files [see screenshot].

Basic things that did not work:

• Restarting the application.
• Finding and moving/deleting the files shown in the UI. It just gets 'stuck' on other files and that quickly becomes too time-consuming.

The UI does not give you any options to deal with specific files, or provide much info on what's wrong, nor do the (somewhat cryptic) logs.

I'm running version 22.126.0612.0002 on MacOS 11.5.2 (Big Sur) and it was last updated on 22 Jun 2022.

Answer 1

These are the things I did that eventually got me back to a fully working OneDrive ("OD" below) sync:

• Performing a reset using the /Applications/OneDrive.app/Contents/Resources/ResetOneDriveAppStandalone.command utility, and logging back into O365. This article provides more detailed instructions.
• I had also moved the default OD folder location (which also used to work), but to reduce the # of variables, I also moved it back to the default location.
• Removing the MacOS .DS_Store file in some folders.
• Removing extended attributes on some files. In a terminal, run xattr -c <filename>.
• Every time it stalled, I stopped and restarted it. I probably did this at least 10 times.
• Another thing that happened was for every file that was modified locally, OD would not necessarily upload it, but would instead download the copy from O365 and rename the local one to something like -. This was a problem for multiple reasons. I searched for all of these files and did a compare between both copies, then deleted the older version. In most cases, the local copy was correct.

Eventually, over a period of a few days, it processed the 130,000+ files. I say 'processed', because even though it would say 'uploading', almost all of the files were already backed up.

Unfortunately, I can't say which of these things did the trick. Perhaps some or even all, but it was certainly the initial reset that got the ball rolling. This was painful, and I'm hoping that at a minimum Microsoft takes some time to increase and improve at least the info that's provided in the UI.