There is a lot of talk about issues with Sky Drive and Windows 8.1. Came across one issue where the metro app worked fine, but sync was not occurring between Sky Drive and the local machine.
The customer reported that it was working fine a few days ago, and that there should have been a process called ‘Skydrive Sync Engine Host‘ Running. This wasn’t the case on this machine.
So I compared it against another machine with a similar setup and confirmed that the service should be running. Using Process Explorer found that it was started by running the C:\Windows\System32\skydrive.exe application. Manually running this application appeared to do nothing. After running it with the Task Manager open I could see the application start and then exit pretty soon after starting.
To get a better understanding of what was happening I used Process monitor to search for the Process Name of skydrive.exe and ran the application. What I found was an Access Denied Error that appeared shortly before the process exited.
Access Denied
So I checked the permission on that folder to find that it had a Ghost account listed on the account. I removed this account and granted the local user full access to the folder as the Sky Drive process appears to run as the local user.
Then I re-ran the C:\Windows\System32\Skydrive.exe application and the Skydrive Sync Engine Host process started and remained running.
Folders and files that were not previously synced started to appear on the local machine and visa versa.
Within the metro app, the process indicator in the top right side of the screen also re-appeared and advised that there were over 200 files to be uploaded. (This was not there previously.)