File Status Auto-Detection, redux

Jay Libove

Specifically what happened this time:
I have File Status Auto-Detection enabled, along with also Silently Update, on several Windows 10/11 systems. (I first started using Silently Update a few weeks ago; it has worked well).
I have a small number of .TXT files which I keep open in NPP on each of these systems all the time; these files are all stored on OneDrive (Sharepoint) storage as part of a Microsoft 365 Enterprise service.
This morning, on a single computer (“Monster10-5”), the only one on which I was working at the moment/ the only one on which I had been working recently, NPP surprised me by mentioning that a conflict had caused it to create a WhateverFileName-Monster10-5 copy of the file.
I diff’d the two versions that had resulted (WhateverFileName.TXT and WhateverFileName-Monster10-5.TXT), and the differences were something that I’d updated on another computer about twelve hours earlier. Looking (on Monster10-5) at OneDrive’s version history for the file, I see modified 13 hours ago, and modified 3 hours ago. The 13 is last night when I modified the file on the other computer, and the 3 is when the event that I’m reporting here occurred.
So, it seems that NPP did not automatically detect this change, and from what little data OneDrive gives us, it suggests that the change should have been detectable.

This is NPP 8.4.8 64-bit on Windows 10 22H2.

I don’t see an open bug report in the issues tracker on this.
Before I open a bug, anyone else see this behavior recently? suggestions?

thanks,
Jay

Prior threads on this topic:
https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/23199/file-status-auto-detection-did-not-notice-a-change-npp-8-4-2/2?_=1676620638457
https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/11857

Alan Kilborn

@Jay-Libove

My experience is that OneDrive and their ilk and Notepad++ don’t play together very well. I quit trying to use them together. There have been some official issues logged against Notepad++ in this regard, but I don’t believe they’ve seen any activity.

Alan Kilborn

@Jay-Libove said in File Status Auto-Detection, redux:

I don’t see an open bug report in the issues tracker on this.

I’m sure these aren’t all relevant to you, but they all mention onedrive somehow; you might look through them:

https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+onedrive

Lycan Thrope

@Jay-Libove ,
In addition to what @Alan-Kilborn has mentioned, some of my own tests with Notepad++ setup with Google Drive as a cloud install, showed a drastic difference in updating file contents and the times that it gets transferred.

What I discovered, is that the local drive Google Drive is what had to be updated, not the network version of it, as until there was a connect between the desktop and the network Google Drive, no real updating occurred. Even with the connect being constant. My guess is that the desktop version didn’t make an update

Whether OneDrive and Google Drive operate the same way, eveyone that I know that has tried a ‘live’ use of One Drive in the dBASE networking scheme has abandoned it, as it’s not really real time. Updates are sporadic and network connections get dropped and mess things up. Using a “storage” network drive as a real time data server seems to be purposefully unreliable. Just food for thought, in addition that I would never trust my data being stored on anything I don’t have direct physical control of.

Had I not had to test out the cloud option of Notepad++, for those of our users that do use it, so I could test how to write an installer that copies files for our UDL to the cloud location of NPP, I would never have even tried this kind of use. I don’t trust my data to anyone else. At best, I use my Google Drive as a free FTP location to download the UDL installer from. :)