Fixing the ‘OneDrive isn’t Connected’ Error

Recently, I noticed that my OneDrive for Business wasn’t logging in. Every time I checked it by clicking on the little blue cloud in the System Tray, I saw this:

No matter how long I let things sit, OneDrive wasn’t logging in. Frankly, I was surprised: OneDrive has been rock solid for a good, long time. I’d put my ODA (OneDrive Angst) from the old Groove.exe days behind me.

I also tried the reset command, which I saw in some posts was a magic elixor: %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\onedrive.exe /reset

But no joy there, either.

I asked my Sympraxian colleagues for suggestions and also posted in an MVP channel I’m privy to. No one had a concrete idea. Each suggestion was more like, “Well, you could try…” No warm fuzzies.

Finally, I realized I’d need to get this fixed. I don’t use my personal OneDrive for Business (not to be confused with OneDrive for Consumers) much, but I sync a lot of Document Libraries to my laptop to make working with them easier. The changes I’d been making were piling up, and I had no idea which libraries I’d made changes in, nor did I know how long the logging in issue had been going on. A few days? A few weeks?

The first thing I did was take a copy of everything in my Sympraxis Consulting sync location.

When I did this, I got errors on a lot of the files, saying that OneDrive for Business wasn’t running. I knew that – I said to skip those files. (I don’t know if that was a good idea or not, but they wouldn’t copy.)

Next I took the VERY brave action of clicking Unlink this PC in the OneDrive settings. (This is a screenshot from a different tenant, but you’ll get the idea.) The reason this scared me is precisely that I had lived though the Groove.exe times and had lost a lot of files doing this before.

What this does is remove the connection between my local synched Document Libraries (which appear as folders in Windows Explorer) and their cloud locations. It doesn’t remove any of those local files, though; I still had everything I wanted.

Next, I went in the browser to one of the Document Libraries I had been synching and clicked the Sync button in the toolbar. As expected, this popped up…

..and on my laptop, this window popped up. As you can see, my account username (email) was already filled in. Since it’s an existing account, I clicked the Sign In button.

The next screen is important if you have your OneDrive files stored in a location other than default, like I do. The default location in Windows 10 is C:\Users\[username]\[OneDrive – [Org Name]]. I store my OneDrive synched libraries in D:\, so I had to click on the Change location link, which isn’t all that obvious unless you are looking for it.

Once you specify the location, you should see a message like this. This is a good thing – it’s OneDrive saying there’s already a folder there with the same name and asking if you would like to use it. Use this folder! A few more Next clicks, and your Document Library is synching again.

If you click Open my OneDrive on the last intro screen, you should see something like this. The little circular arrow icon tells you OneDrive is working to sync that folder.

If you’re like me, you probably sync a lot of Document Libraries to your local machine. In my case, I’m at 32 folders right now. Do I need them all locally? Not really. To re-sync each one, I’ll need to manually go to each site and click the sync button. Given that, I’m only going to re-sync the Document Libraries I’m actually working with currently. I also have to take into account that I need to sync any libraries where I think I’ve done work that may not have synched. In an emergency, I have my copies.

I’m back in business, but it wasn’t a lot of fun. I still have no idea what went wrong, but this set of steps made things good again – as good as I could have hoped. I’d love it if no one ever needs this article, but as usual, if I have to suffer, I might as make it easier for the next one of you who has this issue.

I’ve already suggested to the OneDrive team that there be some sort of warning if OneDrive can’t sign in for a certain period of time. If I had known when it got stuck there, I would have gone though these steps with less of a concern of losing things.

I’ve tried to be positive in this post, but obviously it wasn’t a lot of fun. But OneDrive offers so much benefit to me, I try to be tolerant of the occasional SNAFU. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen one, and I’m hoping this is my last.

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Hans Brender aka ‘Mr. OneDrive’ (@hansbrender) has a post describing a helpful fix idea for issues like this: UserVoice: Save and Restore current OneDrive configuration. Give it a read and vote for his UserVoice suggestion if you agree. I did!

Tom Resing (@resing) pointed out the OneDrive support page in the comments, which is continuously updated with the latest troubleshooting tips.