OneDrive locking files?

Question

I'm a developer for a C++ MFC desktop application. The application does many file manipulations (read, write, move, copy, delete, etc). When one of these operations fails, we usually log it and retry. After a number of retries, we try to figure out what is locking the file, print that to the logs, and give up. We've noticed that OneDrive is often the application locking the files (I can post portions of the source code if needed).

So my questions are:

1) Is it actually OneDrive locking the file perhaps during sync operations? Or is there something else going on and it just looks like it's one drive?

2) If OneDrive is actually the one locking the files, is there a way we can "play nice" with OneDrive so that we don't keep stepping on it? E.g. debounce our save processes or something?

Answer 1

Hi @Al Boggess

Welcome to Q&A forum ~

At present, I have not found relevant documents to directly answer your question 1: Will OneDrive lock the file perhaps during sync operations?
Thanks for your understanding.

As far as I know, if an app is using a file that you have stored on OneDrive, it cannot be synced while the file is open, there would be a message like following image.

Once you have saved your work, and closed this app, OneDrive will sync the file.
So in my opinion, during the synchronization of the file with OneDrive, it must be the case that other software is not doing something on the file.

For the second question, it is recommended that your application process the files before OneDrive synchronizes the files, or after the OneDrive sync files are completed.

Hope the information is helpful to you.

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