In trying to sync to OneDrive, I get a "path is too long" error and fixing it restarts it looking for changes. There may be 20+ overlong paths in my >10,000 unsynced folders and it takes hours to look for changes—is there any way this could be expedited?

Grant Hartlage 0 Reputation points
2025-07-29T06:53:36.0766667+00:00

For material context, the computer I'm talking about is a 2021 Lenovo Thinkpad T14s Gen 2 (AMD) with an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 5650U with Radeon Graphics processor at a nominal 2.30 GHz, 16 GB of RAM (of which 14.8 GB is usable), the 1920 × 1080 display, and an SSD advertised as 512 GB; currently running Windows 10 Pro version 22H2, build 19045.6093 on its internal drive.

So, here's the behavioral context:

  1. I (inadvertently) let my OneDrive subscription expire from May 2024 to April 2025.
  2. After purchasing the service again, I continued to prevent it from syncing as it had content saved in my OneDrive-synced folders I didn't want in OneDrive, and I didn't have a good means of Moving it somewhere else.
  3. After finding a solution to Move items outside of OneDrive-synced folders, I decided to finally sync again on July 27, 2025.
  4. Given my data-hoarding and the extreme time without syncing, OneDrive started processing changes to a whole ~520,000 items, finishing after several hours.
  5. OneDrive froze for a while on the last 24 items for a bit, before moving on to "Look[ing] for changes", which it continued for ~1½ hours.
  6. I got a (1) "We can't sync this item because the path is too long." error. Somehow—this never occurred between January 2023 (when I initially signed up) and May 2024 with the service.
  7. I click "Open location" and attempt to fix the error by shortening the name of the deepest folder by as much as it required.
  8. I click "Try again".
  9. OneDrive starts "Look[ing] for changes" again, which it continued for ~1½ hours.
  10. OneDrive presents another "We can't sync this item because the path is too long." error.

I greatly worry that I have several items with paths too long to be synced with OneDrive (perhaps those were the 24 items it was struggling with), and waiting for OneDrive to "Look[ing] for changes" before it presents me the next error will be a miserable and extremely long process potentially taking several days. Searching for them manually through Windows File Explorer would take even longer, as I have potentially even ~100,000 unsynced folders to cover. And so, the question.

Are there ways to, for instance:

  1. Use a script or program to automatically detect the items with the longest path lengths in the folders I have set to sync?
  2. Force OneDrive to show me all the errors at once?
  3. Force OneDrive to sync all the items except those that can't be synced due to that error?
Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | Windows
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  1. Palcouk 2,881 Reputation points
    2025-08-01T08:43:49.65+00:00

    If the o365 sub expired in April, by now any files located under OneDrive will have been read only for 90 days, and is deleted after 180 days from expiry.

    Uninstall o365 then restart the PC and run disk cleanup, then access your MS Account to reinstall o365 and allow any sync to fully complete before doing anything.

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