As folx might know, I’m currently undertaking a PhD at ANU’s School of Cybernetics – where I’m researching voice and speech data and datasets that are used to train machine learning models used for things like speech recognition and wake word detection. And if you’ve been following my posts on the State of my Toolchain, and my previous post exploring Taguette, you’ll know that I’ve settled on MaxQDA as my qualitative data analysis software. In general, I’ve found MaxQDA to be great software – the user interface is intuitive and the analytical features it have make qualitative data analysis faster. It’s expensive – and is a yearly subscription – but at the moment, it’s earning its price tag.

One definite bugbear I have though is how MaxQDA interacts with SharePoint. As part of my ethics protocol, I am storing my PhD data on university systems – not to external cloud tools like DropBox or Next Cloud. Instead, I save the MaxQDA files to my local (Windows – MaxQDA doesn’t have a Linux client, unfortunately) machine. This is then synced with OneDrive to the University’s SharePoint server.

This works well. Except when it doesn’t.

A couple of months ago I had an error that seemed like a once-off; an error where MaxQDA apparently couldn’t convert the project file. This error was presented when I opened the MaxQDA file (a .mx22 file):

Like so many error messages, it violated design principles for good error messages; it wasn’t a precise description of what had gone wrong, it wasn’t human readable, and it didn’t give me any helpful advice on how to solve the problem. So, I had to figure it out myself.

I tried the obvious things first;

• I closed MaxQDA and re-launched the software; the error persisted.
• I restarted my computer and then re-launched the MaxQDA software; the error persisted.
• I stopped and started the OneDrive service; the error persisted.

At this point, it was clear I’d have to dig deeper into OneDrive. In File Explorer, I could see that the file was still synchronising with OneDrive:

By rights, stopping and starting OneDrive should have re-synchronised the file; but it hadn’t.

OneDrive was also showing a synchronisation error:

Clearly, OneDrive thought that the MaxQDA file was still open; and was not syncing the file to the cloud for this reason. However, closing MaxQDA, OneDrive and a whole reboot had not fixed this error.

My conclusion from this investigation is that MaxQDA somehow leaves an open file handle; for example if the application closes unexpectedly. The open file handle is not cleared via MaxQDA, via OneDrive, or via the underlying Windows operating system. So how else might you clear an open file handle?

Windows isn’t my preferred operating system; and I don’t know enough about the OS internals to go digging into file handles and how to clear them. So I went rm -rf; or about as close to it as you can get on Windows …

The solution

The only thing that did fix the issue was uninstalling OneDrive, re-installing OneDrive, and then re-authenticating OneDrive and allowing it to sync to the cloud. My working hypothesis is that the uninstallation of OneDrive forces Windows to clear any open OneDrive file handles; then the re-installation returns the MaxQDA file to a known good state.

All in all, this took about an hour of investigation to identify the issue and find a workaround. And to be clear – the solution is just a workaround – it doesn’t address the underlying problem – which is that MaxQDA files that synchronise from a local machine to the cloud via OneDrive or SharePoint are prone to synchronisation failure that manifests in an open file handle; which in turn leads to an obscure error message.

This has now happened to me twice – but at least now I know how to fix it next time …

Update: Resetting the OneDrive cache appears to resolve this issue

So, after encountering this issue with MaxQDA for around the fifth time, and even after uninstalling and reinstalling OneDrive, I did a bit more digging, and found some blog posts that suggested resetting the OneDrive cache.

This is covered in this how-to-guide, but the commands are essentially:

1. Open the Windows command tool as Administrator (you need to be an administrator to clear the OneDrive cache)
2. Run the command %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\onedrive.exe /reset\
3. Then restart OneDrive by running the application

This worked for me – so it’s another possible workaround for this very frustrating issue!