Kevin Pocock can’t fix OneDrive. And neither, it seems, can Microsoft
Having committed to Windows 10 last year, I simultaneously switched alliance from Dropbox to OneDrive. Not because of the collective synergy of Microsoft’s products, but because of the 1TB on offer to Office 365 subscribers. For £6.99 a month, remote access to a suite of MS tools is fairly useful; it’s a not a bad price and provides a good backup for the programs installed on my PCs. Yet I rarely use Office’s online tools. In fact, it’s the 0.6 pence per gigabyte of OneDrive space that I enjoy. To reiterate, 1TB of storage for £6.99. That much virtual storage, accessible from anywhere with a data connection, lands squarely in ‘shush up and take my money’ territory.
OneDrive doesn’t just store things, though. It has other features, like the desktop app’s automatic backing-up of media files from a USB-connected smartphone or camera. It also allows for the creation of photo albums, easy link sharing and file version histories. Perhaps the best feature, though, is Fetch. Fetch grows OneDrive beyond pure storage, allowing remote access to files not in the cloud but held by your own PC. For Fetch to work, the computer needs to be on and connected to the internet. It’s a smart idea, and (honestly) adding such a feature to OneDrive speaks to Microsoft’s recent focus on offering flexible and genuinely useful solutions. Fetch is a difference maker in the cloud storage market. There is one small problem, though: Fetch doesn’t work.
Can’t Fetch
Simply saying ‘Fetch doesn’t work’ is a little disingenuous, but it’s a complex issue. After all, were this a normal ‘broken feature’ piece, it wouldn’t command such length. As well you’d hope that by the time you read about any program being banjaxed, the developer or company would have either fixed it or be on the way to doing so. Unfortunately, there’s no suggestion this is the case.
To try Fetch, and unaware of its problems, I naturally followed the setup process provided by Microsoft. You can find this at tinyurl.com/jug2ytk. In the process, you just tick the ‘Let me use OneDrive to fetch any of my files on this PC’ box in the program’s settings. The box ticked, I restarted my PC and logged on. I powered on my laptop to test everything was in order, opened Chrome and headed to onedrive.live.com. Remote file access was just authentication and a PIN code away. No more frustration at going to a co-working hub and forgetting to place a file in OneDrive. The joy, the simple effectiveness, the… well, nothing at all.
Logging on should have shown me my connected PC in the left pane of the window, allowing access to any file I wanted from it. No such luck. ‘Odd’, I thought, but also ‘Hmm, what have I done wrong?’ I admit it, I’m not immune to the occasional mistake. After some tinkering, unlinking and relinking of my PC’s OneDrive folder, I did what we all do when (begrudgingly beaten) our own technical knowledge fails to fix a PC problem: I headed online.
Clear Confusion
It’s rather rare we find technical dead ends, isn’t it? Obscure error message from Windows – somebody’s got a website dedicated to their meaning and resolution. Weird AMD memory leak issue with Battlefield 4? Collective wisdom advises avoiding Radeon HD 6000 cards. OneDrive’s Fetch feature not working? Surprisingly little to go on. Yet determined search-term wrangling brought me to an answers.microsoft.com thread entitled, ‘OneDrive file fetching not working, PCs section missing from OneDrive website’. Quickly the thread revealed itself as a list of posts from some bewildered, but mostly infuriated, users. While my optimism at finding a solution hung in the balance, the picture being painted of the Fetch issue was a muddier and far more bizarre one than expected. Not only, it seems, was Fetch causing problems for OneDrive users, but its refusal to work was caused by another issue.
In OneDrive’s online portal, there is a space in the left pane of the window reserved for connected PCs. But users were receiving a ‘This device has been removed from OneDrive’ notification without removing any device. Worse, they couldn’t relink. Over five pages, the general consensus seemed to sharpen two points. First, that Fetch had worked intermittently before MS disabled it to fix some bugs. And second, that in the time between the first and last posts on the thread (currently the latest is 30th December 2015), Microsoft largely adopted radio silence. One ‘workaround’ involved removing the user wishing to use Fetch from the ‘home’ system, and setting them up a new user.
As Windows 10 thrives on MS accounts, I tried this with an old Hotmail account and found that the new ‘me’ could use Fetch to access the grand total of nothing held by that user account. The old PC administrator me, with all of my life and work files related to my profile, came up against a virtual wall. To quote one of the many disgruntled online posters, the workaround is ‘brutal’. And, as home users looking to make use of Fetch likely have gigabytes of files, settings and data associated with current profiles… well, adding a new user is nothing short of a right royal pain.
Won’t Fetch?
Yet, as I alluded to earlier, this is no usual ‘broken feature’ story. OneDrive’s Fetch – a feature that (should it work) would be incredibly useful to anyone who occasionally forgets to make cloud copies of important files – has been largely refusing to do its job properly since September/October 2015. At the time of writing, that’s a lapse of proper function of over four months. There’s been no official word on when it might be fixed, and little information made available.
In the thread I mentioned earlier, a moderator with the username PranavMishra5582 pitches in to offer support to the miffed masses. In one such post he suggests heading to the OneDrive blog for updates. ‘Ah’, you’d think, ‘something to check in on now and again’, except that the page linked to features a post about as helpful as spooned spaghetti. The blog post reads:
“We’re aware of a temporary issue in which users are being notified a device was removed from OneDrive, even when they took no such action. We apologize for any inconvenience – we are working on resolving this, and will update this post as we have more information.
“We have stopped additional users from getting logged out of OneDrive, but a side effect is that we have temporarily disabled remote fetch of files from PCs. We are working on re-enabling this.”
There have been no updates to this post – not even mentioning the workaround. The feeling, then, is that Microsoft is stonewalling users. It’s odd, particularly as OneDrive is deeply, usefully, integrated with Windows 10 and one of the company’s standout products.
In terms of pure usability, extracting a worthy monthly subscription from users and giving services like Dropbox a run for their money, OneDrive really should astound. But the wait for a Fetch fix goes on and on.