This was certainly a curious one. A small number of users were reporting that they were unable to the OneDrive app locally on their machines. One rather thoughtfully decided to complain straight to a member of management rather than bring the issue to me. I did the usual investigating and discovered nothing particularly useful. Initially, I believed it was potentially being caused by conflicting versions of the OneDrive for Business app being installed. But no amount of uninstalling and reinstalling would resolve the issue. So I turned to that great knower of all. Google.
Some searching showed that I wasn’t the only person having the issue, in fact, it appears to be a ‘known issue’ in Windows 10. Skating right over the fact that it is acceptable for Microsoft to have known issues in their software and expect them to be resolved by the end-users, I started searching for a resolution.
The issue appears to be caused by an incorrect value in the registry specifically the DisableFileSyncNGSC value located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\OneDrive needs to be set to zero. This article from the University of Windsor sums the fix up rather nicely.
However, I needed a solution that would allow for both someone who is unfamiliar with RegEdit to apply and something that would ultimately be scalable to be rolled out to the whole organisation if the need arose. Time for some PowerShell me thinks. Now it should probably go without saying that this would be the first time editing a registry value using PowerShell, so much consultation for Dr. Google was required. Unfortunately, I forgot to take any notes on the exact links I used, but it seems safe to say they were probably either Stackexchange or Reddit.
Ultimately, I came up with the following script which was manually executed on tests machines and confirmed to resolve the issue and, more importantly, not break anything else in the process. Hopefully, someone else will find this Janky little script of mine to be of some use.
Set-ItemProperty -Path ‘HKLM:\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\OneDrive’ -Name ‘DisableFileSyncNGSC’ -Value 0
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