Office 365 OneDrive Desktop Client - Folder in Use error

Author: Sebastian Riesner, Published: 1/15/2020 11:41 AM

One of our customers complained about an error message popping up, when he was trying to open a PDF-file from the local OneDrive folder. The exact message was Folder In Use - The action can't be completed because the folder or a file in it is open in another program

After some investigation I found out, that the very long filepath could be the cause. So in the SharePoint webinterface I went to the library, where the file was residing and moved it to a higher folder level, which let me open the file again.

I was able to reproduce the problem on our Office 365 tenant.

Interestingly, this error seems to only occur, when the path to the folder is short enough, but the filename then exceeds the filepath's maximum length (which is 255 characters, I guess). If the folderpath itself is too long, a different error message pops up: The directory name is invalid

It seems, that it's only the length of the local OneDrive path, that matters. You can work with longer paths in SharePoint directly, but for the sake of better clarity, you should consider using shorter paths, of course.