Bizarre behaviour

[Tim Green]

You must NOT move the topics file. You MUST make a COPY. Only then you will get files with correct properties!

This is necessary because OneDrive is applying its own special read-only attributes with its own special administrator account. If you MOVE the files then all those uneditable (for you) permissions are moved along with the files. If you COPY them you get a fresh copy WITHOUT the permissions. This is a general feature of how moving and copying is different on Windows that is important to know about.

The SAME must be done with the Maps folder! Otherwise you will not be able to create a new TOC!

Actually, it would be much more efficient to just COPY the entire project. Then you get a fresh copy of it without all of OneDrive's restrictive permissions settings.

I'm adding this to my Tech Writing manual's Troubleshooting area as a lifesaving tip.

This can be applied for all situations in Windows where you have files blocked with strange permissions applied under a different account holder. Just copy to a location where you have permissions and you'll be able to edit the files again. As to why you got this away from your own OneDrive folder: It's unfortunately quite possible to sync any folder on your computer with OneDrive. You can identify them by opening the folder in Windows Explorer and checking for a sync column with cloud icons. If you find them then that folder should be taboo for Help+Manual projects.

On the current OneDrive situation:

Over the last few months the behavior of OneDrive has become much more problematic. Every week we have to handle support requests from several customers whose projects have been made inaccessible or corrupted by OneDrive. We are very aware of this and we're working on a solution to prevent this, which we hope will become available relatively soon. For the time being we can only urgently recommend that you never try to edit any kind of Help+Manual project in a OneDrive folder, or any other managed cloud folder. OneDrive is by far the worst, but Google Drive, iCloud Drive, DropBox and all the others will also cause problems.

Some background on OneDrive:

If you try to edit or synchronize Help+Manual projects in OneDrive (the absolute worst culprit) or any other managed cloud folder like iCloud Drive, DropBox or Google Drive you will get corrupted files, lost data, strange errors with locked files and other problems. If you then combine this with management by version control you can experience even more serious issues, including irreversible corruption of your version control repository. You are relatively safe with single-file HMXZ projects, so long as they are not open in OneDrive on another computer, but It gets (very) problematic if you are using the uncompressed HMXP project format, with access to OneDrive on more than one machine.

OneDrive and other managed cloud folders are fine for archiving and transfers, but they are generally only safe for active editing with programs that are specifically designed to interact with them. In the case of Microsoft that is only Office and some other Microsoft programs. They don't provide adequate access to their complex API for third party developers. It's similar with Google Drive, which only works reliably with Google's own applications like Google Docs.

Even on systems like DropBox that do provide some third party API access, it does not work very well. For example, the Scrivener novel-writing tool has a similar structure to Help+Manual, but with RTF files instead of XML. The intrepid Scrivener developers have added literally thousands of lines of code to try to get Scrivener to play nice with DropBox, but it still only "works" if you never ever open a Scrivener project on more than one computer linked to the same DropBox. If you do -- even if one copy simply remains open on another computer because you forgot to close it -- you get a horrible mess of "conflicted copies" of the text files that is very difficult to untangle, because each copy contains a different editing status.