The complaint that wouldn't go away
Front desk staff at a 14-property regional hotel group kept filing the same ticket, worded slightly differently each time: "OneDrive is stuck syncing." Reservations templates wouldn't update. Shared rate sheets showed a spinning icon for hours. At one property, a duty manager gave up on sync entirely and started emailing spreadsheets around instead, defeating the entire point of having a shared library.
| Metric | Before cleanup |
|---|---|
| Properties reporting sync issues | 9 of 14 |
| Empty folders across the operations library | 6,412 |
| Average sync client CPU usage during sync | Consistently elevated, per IT helpdesk logs |
| Support tickets tagged "sync" per month | Roughly 40 |
Priya, the group's regional IT coordinator, inherited the ticket queue after a staffing change and started looking for a root cause instead of resetting the sync client one more time.
What is actually slow about the SharePoint sync client?
The OneDrive sync client has to enumerate every item in a synced library, including folders that contain nothing, every time it reconciles state with SharePoint. A library with thousands of empty folders forces the client to track and revalidate all of them on every sync cycle, adding real overhead even though none of those folders hold a single file.
Finding the actual cause
Priya's first assumption was bandwidth. Several properties were on shared internet connections with other tenants in the same building, and slow uploads seemed like the obvious explanation. A bandwidth test ruled that out quickly; connections were adequate at every property, including the ones with the worst complaints.
The pattern that actually held up: properties reporting sync problems were the same properties whose operations library had been in use the longest. Newer properties, onboarded in the past two years, had almost no complaints. That pointed toward accumulated structure rather than raw content volume, since the total file count wasn't dramatically different between old and new sites.
Using ShareMaster's Report Master, Priya pulled a folder-count breakdown across all 14 operations libraries. The oldest properties, some in continuous use since a 2019 SharePoint rollout, had thousands of folders each with zero files inside them. Years of seasonal folder structures (created for a promotion, an event, a renovation project) had been created, used briefly, emptied out at the end of the season, and left in place rather than deleted.
Cleaning up 6,412 empty folders without breaking anything
Manually reviewing thousands of folders across 14 sites to confirm each was genuinely empty, and safe to remove, was not realistic for a small IT team already handling day-to-day support. Priya used ShareMaster's Space Master Empty Folder Remover, which scans a library, identifies folders with zero files (including nested empty subfolders), and removes them in bulk after a preview step.
- Ran the scan across all 14 operations libraries and reviewed the preview list before deleting anything.
- Excluded a handful of folders flagged by property managers as intentional placeholders for an upcoming project.
- Ran the bulk removal, which sent removed folders to the recycle bin rather than deleting permanently, giving a safety net for the first pass.
- Repeated the scan two weeks later to catch newly emptied folders from routine seasonal cleanup, then adopted a habit of manually rerunning the scan each quarter.
Results
6,412 empty folders were removed across the 14 properties in a single afternoon. Sync complaints dropped sharply within the first two weeks. By the following month, tickets tagged "sync" fell from around 40 per month to single digits, and the properties that had reported the worst problems were the ones with the biggest folder-count reductions, which matched Priya's hypothesis directly.
The secondary benefit: browsing the libraries in a browser became noticeably faster too. Folder listing views that previously took a moment to render loaded close to instantly once the dead weight of empty structure was gone.
What other multi-site organisations can take from this
Folder sprawl accumulates fastest in organisations with seasonal or project-based work patterns: hospitality, education, event management, retail. A folder created for a specific purpose, used for weeks, then abandoned in place, costs nothing obvious in storage but adds up in enumeration overhead once thousands of them exist across a multi-site tenant.
- Empty-folder buildup is invisible in standard storage reports, which measure bytes, not folder counts.
- Multi-site organisations should check every site, not just the ones generating complaints. Some properties in this case had similar folder counts but hadn't yet crossed whatever threshold triggers a noticeable slowdown.
- A habit of rerunning the cleanup scan every quarter prevents the same problem from silently rebuilding over the following two or three years.
For the storage side of a similar cleanup, see the comparison of empty folder removal options. For a broader look at what drives SharePoint storage growth beyond folders, see the piece on recycle bin quota drain.