How to get OneDrive out of a sync loop

Today, we got a desperate call from a client who, despite verifying that AutoSave was turned on in Word, had lost several hours of work.

I suspected that AutoSave was doing its job, but that the edits hadn't uploaded to OneDrive, when I saw this:

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OneDrive was counting down from 10s of thousands to 0 then starting over, a loop.

It made sense that his edits must live somewhere, so I used Resource Monitor to see what file OneDrive.exe was hammering: a was 400 MB .dat file in: C:\Users\jsmith\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive\settings\Business1

After killing OneDrive, renaming the file, then starting OneDrive again, OneDrive started syncing 100s of thousands of files. So, while he might have lost some work, at least OneDrive will be caught up!

Maybe I'll put that file back to its original name to see whether it will process those changes 🤞

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