How to get live help?

Question

How to get live help?

Eddie X Dobelstein 0

I need live help. I've had it before, less than a year ago. I'll take live chat or phone. Right after I got my new laptop I started on the process below but stalled out. I had 2 live online chats and one by phone. The support rep on the phone even discovered a failure point in Windows 11 and completely reinstalled it, undoing a lot of the set-up I had done. Now, every time I work through the help process I hit a place that circles me back to start over. If they had a problem-solving matrix that actually led to a solution I would have found it by now and done it. I'm not lazy or intellectually challenged. Just a little older.

I bought the new laptop about a year ago because my old one wouldn't upgrade from Win10 to Win11. In the process of transferring my data I started by creating a second MS accounts because I'm slowly working my way out of the email address from my own business domain to a gmail address--all because I retired and I want to sell the domain. If I had waited until later in the process to establish the second account it would have worked better. Now I have tons of constraints "for privacy reasons" per Microsoft.

I decided to trust Microsoft OneDrive to handle moving everything between computers because I read it would be seamless and do everything. That was the worst idea. First, it took 3 days or more initially syncing my old computer to OneDrive. Then the problems dealing with 2 accounts hit. I've been working on this off and on the whole year, stuck using my old messed laptop. After long research and consideration of options, I decided to transfer all my data from old computer to new via direct Ethernet. That actually worked great. Then I started the sync process from new computer to new MS acct/OneDrive acct. That has been going 2 days and I'm seeing files appear (FileName-copy) duplicating every file.

When I go directly to the new computer's SSD and navigate to Documents it's empty. That's disturbing because I always have and still want my local drive to be my primary place to keep my data, using a local external drive for backup. In this changeover I decided to join this century and backup to a cloud too. Maybe everything can work out if I can figure out how to make my computer drive hold everything, delete over 45K "copy" files, make sure my new MS account has my files properly, delete my old MS account, and toss the old laptop out the window.

Many thanks in advance to all who take the time to read this and I'll come mow your yard if you help me solve this.

Eddie

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3 answers

Your answer

Answer 1

Hello, and I apologize for the late reply.

Because one change on one PC happens on all PCs, I believe it's a good idea to just start over on the sync process.

To start, please make sure turn off the important file backup on your old laptop, for all folders listed. You can do this by right clicking the OneDrive cloud icon on the taskbar, selecting "Settings" in the flyout, and then it should be the first option. Then, once it turns off, quit the OneDrive app (or alternatively, pause syncing for 24 hours). Open File Explorer on the same laptop. Open your OneDrive folder located in your user directory and type *- Copy.* into the search bar. This will show you all the files that have copy in their name, which should be the duplicates. It may take a while to search. Then, delete the duplicates, keeping the originals. On the new computer, delete both the files that were copied as well as the files that you moved via Ethernet. Or place them in a separate folder so in case you do something wrong, you can go back to them. Then, turn important file backup off on your new laptop, and quit OneDrive.

After you go through this process, on the old computer, make sure all files are marked as "Always available offline", and then unlink your old Microsoft account from OneDrive. Now, sign into your new Microsoft account. When asked to select a path, use the old path that was left behind by the old account. Then, make sure that all the files are synced to the cloud. You can check this by hovering over the OneDrive cloud icon on the taskbar. Once it's done, turn on important file backup again on all folders, on the old computer.

Once you have made sure that the files are all synced, turn on important file sync on your new computer. Watch the sync to make sure that the files aren't copied in a janky way again.

See if that fixes your issue. I hope to hear back from you.

Answer 2

After 2 or 3 days of syncing (between cloud & new computer) I stopped it. As I mentioned, my old computer had also started syncing too, receiving [filename]-copy.ext. My documents folder in OneDrive on my new PC is double the size of my original documents folder on the old PC. When I scan through random folders I see a duplicate of EVERY file. At this point, I'm convinced that if I delete every duplicate file, the next time I turn on sync it will just start over.

Just to clarify-my original goal was to transfer all my files to my new computer, set up a new MS account, and delete the old MS account. I planned to use OneDrive as a cloud backup. Because of my wife sharing her 365 subscription, I had plenty of space in OneDrive without extra fees (like I would have if I chose a different cloud). What I thought I knew about OneDrive making the transfer easy was SO wrong. If I had understood how it worked I would have run away screaming.

I'm just lost trying to fix this. I've spent days with this when I desperately needed to be doing other stuff. I pretty sure I can't fully reverse everything I've done and start over.

Answer 3

Airbus A350 8,120 Volunteer Moderator

Hello,

Live support is available from https://support.microsoft.com/contactus. However, there are a bit of hoops you need to jump through to actually get to an agent.

If you've already moved files onto your new laptop from your old one via Ethernet and then synced OneDrive, that's probably why you see the duplicate files.

I would recommend either pausing syncing or quitting the OneDrive app on your new PC to prevent sync collision issues for now. With the way OneDrive works, it "binds" the core user folders together (for lack of a better term) and moves it to OneDrive so it's synced on all of your devices. Because you moved the files already, the files that were already on the old computer are already on your new one, and then OneDrive synced a second set of the exact same files which resulted in the filename (copy) issue.

Could you clarify the account situation on your laptop(s) (i.e. which laptops have which accounts on them)? This way, I can come up with a better solution than a generic one.

I hope to hear back from you.

DA Caldwell 20 Reputation points

2026-09-30T21:31:15.4233333+00:00

Reading Eddie's problems...I too have a similar problem...with twist; 2-3 months ago I had and still have computer freezing up. I rest Windows 11 and everything has been moved to the C drive; One Drive triplicating and quadrupling photos and what ever it wants to it seems; empty folders...continue even on the C: Drive; I have been chatting with Microsoft AI for the last week or so... it can't help what's going on; I can't even give the AI permission to get into this system to fix it! Can support see all the chat I've had with AI? I need to fix this problem...I don't want everything in the C Drive...the only other option is G drive that I am not able to access...............help!
Eddie X Dobelstein 0 Reputation points

2026-09-30T22:21:25.18+00:00

I checked and both computers are logged into the new MS acct. Normally the old computer stayed on the old account. I don't know where the old computer was logged in at the time of the Ethernet transfer. Maybe the old computer had to be on the new acct for the files to transfer because MS says you can't move files between MS accounts.

The thing that has me confused is I thought I copied all my files to the new computer directly into the Documents folder via This PC>SSD (C:)>Users>[Me]>Documents. Maybe I'm misremembering and put it in the Doc's folder under OneDrive. Either way, the transfer first said 22 hours but kept dropping. I think it took under 1 hour, certainly no more than 2. There's no way that included syncing with the server that fast. So when I looked at the server and saw the Doc's file structure I was surprised. Everything's running together now so I'm not sure if I checked the contents of the folders.

Anyway, I figured I wanted the new PC and Cloud OneDrive synced so I said GO. It was at least the next day before I realized about the copies. Right now the upload is at 58%. I really don't know what is where any more. I have the entire Documents folder checked to always keep on this (the new one) computer. What I can see on file manager is that a lot of files/folders have green circles with white checks (both places) and the rest have the blue circling arrows (pending).

So to clarify-OneDrive kinda takes over control of the This [new] PC>SSD (C:)>Users>[Me]>Documents folder. It looks like if that folder was empty and files get transferred in OneDrive intercepts them and tags them as belonging to one drive. It also looks like if a Docs folder started out populated OneDrive runs as a parallel structure.

The transfer rate from the new computer to the cloud (if that's what's happening) is ridiculous right now. in the last 5-10 minutes about 0.5 gb has moved.

So you think I need to stop the sync? It looks like most of the pending files are the copies. It's not duplicating the folder structure. A few minutes ago I went to the new account onedrive to check what I could tell from that. It started downloading random files from the cloud. It's saving those files as copies on my old PC.

To err is human.

To really foul things up you need a computer.

This is 2 computers and a cloud. I'm totally done for!
Airbus A350 8,120 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator

2026-10-02T19:32:39.6133333+00:00

Hello, and I apologize for the late reply.

At this stage, it's not necessary to stop the syncing. I would also assume that the sync is done, therefore it's possible to check for duplicate files. You can use software like Czkawka to find duplicate files in your directories and remove them. If you need help with this step, I can do so.

In addition, when you mark files as "Always available on this device", that just means that files will be downloaded to your device, and freeing up space (when right-clicking and selecting "Free up Space" in File Explorer) will not touch the file; it always stays available. Instead, you would want to open the settings for OneDrive and then select "Manage backup" under "Backup important files to the cloud". However, if you disable this option for any of the folders you see available, OneDrive will not sync files in said folder(s) to the cloud anymore, making them a local copy only (unsure if this is what you are trying to accomplish). With this being said however, you can use software to manually sync to a specific directory (or directories) and sync that way.

OneDrive does sort of take over the Documents folder (and other folders), as you said. By default, OneDrive does that with the Desktop, Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders, as those are the "most important folders" in a user directory. The old computer being signed in with a different account is also okay; Microsoft's comment saying that you can't move files between accounts is mainly for OneDrive, you can't move files between different accounts unless you sign in on both accounts and transfer files that way.

I hope this information helps.