“It’s not syncing” is one of those complaints that can mean ten different things. A file stuck with a red cross. A folder one person can see and their colleague can’t. A shared drive missing from File Explorer. An iPad that won’t upload.
From 19 August 2025 to 18 August 2026, 24 clients raised 59 tickets about Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive or syncing, 51 of them not counting replies. They took 21.2 hours.
What the tickets were
Roughly, they fell into four kinds.
OneDrive not behaving. Sync problems at a legal practice that led to an hour of fixing and then a longer conversation about how the firm used OneDrive. An iPad that couldn’t upload. A club that couldn’t save to its desktop, downloads or OneDrive. A OneDrive that needed relinking to a shared business account.
Access to SharePoint. Requests to give staff access to a site, to give a contractor administrator access, and to give an outside auditor access.
Moving files to the right place. Moving one person’s OneDrive files into SharePoint, moving service files into SharePoint, moving another business from Dropbox to OneDrive, and SharePoint work for a club’s second venue.
Sync tools that aren’t Microsoft’s. A separate file sync tool that wasn’t syncing between a laptop and a desktop, and a Google Workspace mailbox that wouldn’t sync with Outlook.
OneDrive or SharePoint?
The single biggest source of confusion is files living in the wrong place. Microsoft’s own guidance is plain. Personal files or documents that only you are working on can be securely stored on OneDrive, while SharePoint is for storing files and making them accessible to a broad audience.
In practice, plenty of small businesses end up with the company’s shared files sitting in one person’s OneDrive, shared out folder by folder. It works until that person leaves, runs out of space, or changes a sharing setting without realising who it affects.
Why big shared libraries misbehave
Syncing lets people work with SharePoint files in File Explorer as if they were on the PC. For a modest library, that’s fine.
It goes wrong when every PC syncs everything. Every machine has to keep track of every file in every library it syncs, a single rename has to ripple out to all of them, and two people editing the same file offline can end up with conflicting copies. Very long folder paths and desktop software that locks files while they’re open make it worse.
The set-up we’d recommend
The file moves in the tickets above point the same way, and it’s the set-up we’d recommend for most small businesses.
- Shared business files go into SharePoint, organised by team or function.
- Permissions are set on the site or library, not on individual folders.
- Each person’s own working files stay in their OneDrive.
- Staff sync only the libraries they use every day, and open the rest in the browser or Teams.
Where to start
Ask two questions. Where do your shared business files actually live today? And if the person whose OneDrive holds them left tomorrow, who could get to them?
If either answer makes you uneasy, ask us to review where your shared files live.