"Source and destination are same"

[JeffL]

 

I don't fully understand what condition is causing this, but here's what I observed:

I moved some Excel spreadsheets and txt files to OneDrive so that I can work on them from either of two computers.  The spreadsheet has macros that create new files, or maybe I should say renames a current txt file to xxxxOld, and writes a new xxxx file.  It also creates a new copy of the spreadsheet itself with a date added as part of the file name so that I can keep 30 day's of the spreadsheet.

The problem is, when a new file is created in OneDrive on computer #1, when I attempt to open that file (from windows explorer) on computer #2, I get the "Source and destination are same"  popup.  If I just close the popup, the file will open just fine.  One other point, I ran the DIR command to look at the files on OneDrive, the trouble files on computer #2 have parenthesis around the file size.  The parenthesis will go away after closing the pop up.

Any ideas?

[JeffL]

QUIT LOOKING, I FOUND IT!

No replies, but after posting I did more research on OnDrive and I think I fixed it I wasn't aware of the options of having your files only on the cloud, or both on the cloud and my HD. I assumed it was just the latter, which is what I wanted, and the reason I migrated my spreadsheets and related data files to OneDrive in the first place.

It turned out that basically, I was in "FIles on demand" mode on my computers for folder/files I was using. The files were not downloaded until I opened them. Those were the files whose size appeared in parenthesis in DIR. Apparently, the popup error was sort of a warning. Once I checked off "Always keep on this device", the parenthesis went away, the files were on my HD, they opened without a problem, and everything worked as expected.

[Steve K.]

Glad you figured it out. Here's details which explains how OneDrive Files on Demand works - https://www.groovypost.com/howto/enable-onedrive-on-demand-files-windows-10/.

Thanks!

[Eric]

This error is erroneous - its a bug in Onedrive.  I get this error several times when copying files

And I know the source and destination are different.  It will even tell me files already exist and ask if I want to overwrite - when no files in the destination exist.

Here's what's really going on:

Onedrive imposes more restrictions on file naming than standard WIndows NTFS does.  For example path size, characters allowed, etc, vasty more restrictive (even in 2023) for OneDrive.

When Onedrive is initially installed, it takes over your profile folder.  It creates new folders for Onedrive - however the pathnames are much longer than c:\users\eric

In one customer's system the path was already 200 characters - because it spelled the business name out completely in the path - so before you even put a file in your onedrive - its pathname is already 200 bytes big.  

Onedrive likes to change filenames - sometimes it will replace characters in your filename to make it compatible with Onedrive.

 

All of these caveats when Onedrive can't complete - will respond with the user with that erroneous error message.