If you’ve installed OneDrive from Microsoft, I hope you found the installation painless. There is a wizard that initially walks you through the process by asking just a couple of questions. After that, your files, pictures and other documents should seamlessly sync across your computer, to the cloud and to any other of your devices where you have OneDrive installed.
Sometimes sync errors happen. You can tell because there will be a red image that appears over the OneDrive icon in your system tray. Earlier this year (around May, 2014, I think), 
Microsoft put out a troubleshooter tool to help correct sync errors. These are some common errors you might see (from the Windows article):
- OneDrive doesn’t appear in the left pane in File Explorer.
- Even though you’re connected to the Internet, you can’t connect to OneDrive.
- Some of your OneDrive files or folders are missing on your PC.
- Some files or folders won’t upload from your PC to OneDrive.
- The OneDrive icon doesn’t appear in the notification area, at the far right of the taskbar. (In Task Manager, the sync engine process doesn’t appear.)
- You see the message “You don’t have permission to save to this location. Contact the administrator to obtain permission.”
I wish the OneDrive troubleshooter tool would pop up and ask to run as we’re having problems, but it doesn’t. You can download it from the link above, or just do a search for the OneDrive Troubleshooter tool. You can save it to your desktop, but it might be best to download and run it each time you have a problem in case the tool has been updated.
When it starts running, you’ll immediately see the screen below, so of course choose ‘Next’.
You might notice the ‘Advanced’ hyperlink. The only choice there is to check that you want repairs to be made automatically. Then that’s it. It runs, looks for errors and hopefully fixes them. I haven’t had the opportunity to use it, so I can’t say how well it works. If anyone out there has some experience with it, please leave a comment below.
I do think having this tool is an improvement from having to troubleshoot errors on our own. OneDrive has been making constant upgrades to their service. The one I’m waiting for is the one where I will have files shared with me available to me on my computer instead of having to log into the cloud to access them.