The problem

Recently I started up one of my long term windows 10 desktop machines and OneDrive was not running. My OneDrive folder was still there and when I tried to open a file that was still on the cloud it would not download?

Looking around I found that OneDrive was not running in my system tray.

Attempted Fixes

I tried a few different things;

1. Download a new version
   1. Nope did not work as just told me I already had a newer version install.
2. State off the website
   1. when you go to download there is a “Start OneDrive” button that tries to launch something on your computer. Did nothing for me!!
3. Uninstall
   1. Went into control panel and tried to uninstall. I found a onedrive entry and I uninstalled but it did not really do anything, as I could not re-install after that as it still complained I had a later version already installed.
4. I restarted between all of these attempts
5. Watch a few youtube vidoes
   1. Registry fix – nope didn’t have the regsitroy
   2. local Policy change – nope did nothing.

The fix

So what fixed it..

Try the following, it worked for me;

1. Launch the task manager (right click the toolbar – select task manager)
2. Select the startup tab.
3. Sort alphabetically by name and find “Microsoft OneDrive in the list.
4. Right click and choose “Open file location”
   1. This took me to “%localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive”
5. In this folder I had a sub-folder called “Update”
6. Go into the update folder
7. In there is a file called “OneDriveSetup.exe”
8. Run it

It ran a small update and then my Onedrive process automatically started up and re-connected to my existing OneDrive folder.

Problem solved 🙂

Hope this works for you too