The accounts office remote desktop, with OneDrive unstuck.
A healthcare group's accounts office works on a Windows remote desktop in AWS. OneDrive never finished syncing: the cause was over a million items.
A healthcare group's administration and accounts office works on a Windows Server 2019 Remote Desktop Services host on AWS: three users, persistent local profiles, RDP not exposed to the internet. OneDrive is installed per machine, with silent account configuration and known folder move. Sync kept failing: there were 1,193,040 synced items, against the roughly 300,000 Microsoft supports for good performance. We cut them down with an exclusion list and by moving the accounting software's service folder.
Context
Three people work on the same server every day: accounts, the accounting software, office archives. A single host with persistent local profiles is the simplest setup for this many users. We looked at FSLogix and ruled it out: it's for profiles that move between several hosts, and here there is one.
The problem
OneDrive kept showing errors and never finished syncing, and every error left doubt about which version of a file was the right one. Around the same time the RDS licensing grace period had expired: left alone, users would no longer have been able to connect.
What we did
- 01
Per-machine OneDrive
Installed with OneDriveSetup /allusers, silent account configuration and known folder move: each user's main folders go to OneDrive without anyone configuring anything.
- 02
Count the items
The cause of the block was volume: 1,193,040 synced items, against the roughly 300,000 Microsoft supports for good performance.
- 03
Take out what shouldn't sync
An exclusion list, and the accounting software's service folder moved out of OneDrive with a junction: the program finds it where it always looked, OneDrive no longer sees it.
- 04
Licensing in order
The RDS licensing grace period reset so work wouldn't stop, and proper RDS CALs planned.
- 05
Sized for the people using it
For a similar server, also for three RDP users, we cut the proposal from c7i.4xlarge to m7i.xlarge, with AWS Backup.
- 06
The next step
Shared archives move to a SharePoint site, and cross-user folder permissions get cleaned up.
How it went
With the exclusions in place and the service folder out of OneDrive, sync stopped getting stuck. The server stays simple: one host, local profiles, no extra component to maintain.
Tools
FAQ
Is FSLogix needed for a Remote Desktop server?
Not with a single host. FSLogix is for profiles that must follow users across several servers; on one host with persistent local profiles it adds complexity with no benefit.
Why does OneDrive get stuck with too many files?
Microsoft gives about 300,000 items as the threshold for good performance. Beyond that, change detection slows down and sync piles up errors.
Why scale down the proposed server?
For three users running office applications and accounting software, a general-purpose instance is enough. A much larger compute-optimised instance costs more without helping the people using it.