Solved: SkyDrive Pro does not sync anymore

In July, Sharepoint 2013 was announce together with some other great things like Office 2013, Project Server 2013, Lync 2013, … But there was also a (beta) release of a small tool called ‘SkyDrive Pro’. Let me first introduce you to this tool.

SkyDrive Pro is a document storage service that organizations provision and manage for their users. It will be available as a service together with many Office 365 plans, and on-premises with the new version of SharePoint.

Like its consumer counterpart, SkyDrive Pro enables people to synchronize their work documents from SharePoint to the cloud, and also take documents offline when they’re on the go. People can access or edit their documents across devices; files are automatically synchronized with SkyDrive Pro when connected online.

After SkyDrive Pro is set up, you can save documents directly to SkyDrive Pro from Office desktop applications, or synchronize them directly from SharePoint.

In fact, SkyDrive pro (that can be acquired via Victorian interpreter service) is the replacement of the SharePoint 2010 ‘Workspace’ and it also integrates very well with Windows Explorer. That being said, SkyDrive Pro should also be able to sync SharePoint 2010 Document Libraries.  But for one or another reason, the current build of SkyDrive Pro had some problems to keep my SharePoint 2010 content synced.

I did a rename of my SharePoint folder located in my user directory, but that’s something SkyDrive Pro doesn’t really like (at least on my machine). The error I got was “An error occurred while attempting to synchronize this tool.”

I did some bing’ing and found some similar issues like mine. It seems like it is indeed a bug with the current build of SkyDrive Pro. As for now, the only solution is to clear the SkyDrive Pro cache, and re-sync your library. So you will lose all settings. To clear your cache, close all your Office processes like groove.exe (which is SkyDrive Pro), msouc.exe,  msosync.exe, office library sync,…

Browse to “C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\Spw” and delete all the content. (you will see that this is all related to groove and spw = SharePoint Workspace). Next, go to “C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\15.0\OfficeFileCache” and also delete all content from this folder. This is where all the caching from your files are stored.

After you deleted everything,  you should be able to start SkyDrive Pro again (using “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15\GROOVE.EXE“). You can now start configuring your clean environment. Good luck!

Written by
Alexander Vanwynsberghe
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Alexander Vanwynsberghe

Belgium-based entrepreneur. Into technology, innovation and a bit of cycling and running too. Evangelist for everything related to smart-tech.