Hans Brender's Blog

Soon also in your OneDrive.

If you have installed the Insiders version of OneDrive, then it is already visible. In the settings under About. And with the GUID it is unique. Clearly on your computer. Definitely for every Office 365 tenant, if you have more than one. And it doesn’t matter whether OneDrive for Business or OneDrive Personal. Each instance has a unique OneDrive device ID. And if you have multiple computers, on each computer.

I would have liked to have had this already at the beginning of the OneDrive app development. Because then you could have isolated errors better and faster. There are log files for each instance on your computer and the OneDrive device ID can also be found in the SyncDiagnostics.log

What can the user do with it? First of all, nothing. However, it can lead to a faster solution if you have problems with the OneDrive app. Because it may well be that you only have a problem with one instance. That means OneDrive in general is ok, but you can find the error faster. In the OneDrive program directory there is a batch file that collects all the log files that cannot be read by the user and stores them compressed in a CAB file. And with both pieces of information, Microsoft can then isolate a possible error more quickly.

In the future, options are also planned that are intended for the administrator of the Office 365 tenant. Microsoft is working on a solution that allows the administrator to examine all devices of all employees for OneDrive errors and then write the results in an Excel spreadsheet. So do not be surprised if the administrator of your company reports to you and tells you that there is a problem on your company laptop. And you still haven’t noticed it overheated! The OneDrive device ID is also used for this.