Why does Runtime Broker download all my always online files from OneDrive?

Question

I have alot of always Online files on my computer from OneDrive.
But suddently Windows Runtime Broker started to download all of my files from OneDrive to make a index of them, but now my harddrive are filled with files I just want on my OneDrive and not locally on my computer.

Is this some kind of bug in Windows 10 v1909?

Answer 1

Just sharing how I solved a similar problem.
On my PC, OneDrive was downloading .txt files. It turns out it's because of windows's indexing function that runs once in a while.
While this might be useful (allows windows to search content of text files when you search for something), you might want to remove it.
To fix this you have to disable File Contents for txt files (or any other you have problems with) .

Here is how to do it:

To disable indexing of file properties and contents in Windows for TXT files or any other file type, follow these steps: nullnullnullnullnullnullnull

After disabling indexing of file properties and contents for a specific file type, the indexing service will only index basic file properties, such as the file name and date modified, without indexing the contents of the file. This will prevent unnecessary indexing and downloading of files, which may help improve system performance and reduce network traffic.

Answer 2

To Fix this issue read the post by AdalbertoHernandezVega-5305 answer from Jun 20 2021

"I noticed the issue started to happen right after I changed a setting in File Explorer: Settings - Search (Tab) - under: "When searching non-indexed locations" - Uncheck: "Always search the filenames and contents..." Apply and OK."

Answer 3

I hope your fix works for me. So far 1 minute with nothing downloading...Yeay!
I have a question. Why are we having this issue? Did we get one update or something that had this bug? About 6 years ago I had a download that disabled my pc and I had to purchase a new one because I couldn't fix the problem. I hope nothing like that happens, but I would like to know why? Is Microsoft doing this? Thank you

Answer 4

The best answer I have, as someone who experiences this issue myself, is to go into task manager and kill runtime broker. This is not a good answer as another instance of runtime broker handles starting applications from the start menu and taskbar. The runtime broker instance you are looking for uses the most memory or is using the disk. If you kill OneDrive, its CPU usage spikes.

1. Click show more details under task manager
2. Filter by memory usage. The instance of runtime broker you are looking for typically uses around 400 MiB of RAM
3. If the instance is not there, pause OneDrive sync, the instance of runtime broker should see a significant increase in CPU usage.
4. Kill only that instance of Runtime Broker. If you did not pause OneDrive sync, cancel the download.

For the Microsoft Developers, there is some application, probably either Photos or Search and Indexing, that needs to query the OneDrive server for information on files instead of the files themselves when the files are online.

Answer 5

For me .. it was another App (OBS studio) that was building a slideshow feature with my picture folder. I seems that that app, triggered the runtime environmnet to keep downloading ...