I’m having an issue with OneDrive and Fontbase getting stuck syncing font files.
System info:
OS: Windows 11 Home Version: 24H2 FontBase version: 2.21.0
Description
I use OneDrive to organize my work files, including my fonts. Fontbase is set to watch a folder inside my OneDrive directory. Normally this works fine, but for the last few days, OneDrive has been stuck with 29 pending changes, all of them being font files.
Even when I:
Quit Fontbase and OneDrive completely,
End all related processes in Task Manager,
Restart my computer,
…the pending changes remain. I also can’t delete or move those font files — Windows says they’re “in use by another program”.
What caused it
The issue started randomly — I hadn’t changed anything major in my setup. My guess is that OneDrive and Fontbase are conflicting over file access/locking when fonts are activated.
Questions
Has anyone else experienced this with OneDrive?
Does Dropbox handle this better for watched folders (since that’s the example setup on Fontbase’s website)?
Is there a best practice for using Fontbase with cloud storage, or should I move my fonts to a local folder and just back them up manually? (I really don’t want to do this, as I hate the risks with manual storage, and love the convenience of having my files available everywhere).
Hello Niels, thank you for your post and welcome to the forum
First off, regarding your questions:
Haven’t seen reports like this, but the issue seems somewhat similar to the discussion here: Cannot delete fontbase font folder
tl;dr: it’s possible some system fonts were copied into folders synced with FontBase, and even though FontBase itself is not blocking them in any way, the OS things the user is trying to delete a system font. A possible solution could lie in copying the relevant fonts to a safe place, uninstalling them from the Windows/Fonts folder, removing the unwanted extra copies and then installing the copies stored in the safe place mentioned above.
Hopefully other forum members will weigh in on this as well. The shouldn’t be any difference between OneDrive and Dropbox (with offline file access enabled) in this respect.
Your setup seems to fulfill most of the best practice criteria already. The only things to improve could include making sure no system fonts get into FontBase-related folders (for reasons mentioned in answer 1) and making sure FontBase is always started after OneDrive is fully started and functional, i.e. preferably refrain from setting both of these apps to auto-start on system startup, as this could result in a situation where FontBase is already working while OneDrive is stil loading, thus confusing FontBase as to font file availability and making it think files were deleted, when in reality they will be available shortly.
Based on the tests you’re already performed this shouldn’t be a file access conflict with FontBase, as closing FontBase and restarting the system eliminates any potential locking/access on the part of FontBase until it’s restarted.
