What are these brown box icons in left bottom corner of my files??

Anonymous
2022-03-07T21:29:56+00:00

Does anyone know where these small brown box icons came from and what they mean?? I suddenly have these little brown icons (looks like a small file box) on most of my files, Word, pdf, photos, etc. I've googled the daylights out of this and apparently lots of folks have the same question but no one has an answer. I hasn't affected my ability to open files but it's really annoying! (see pic below) Does it have something to do with my upgrade to Windows 11?

Thanks!

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Performance and system failures

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Anonymous
2022-04-23T00:35:08+00:00

Had this exact same issue today. The resolution was quick no reinstall. I'm on Win11, so perhaps that was a plus in this scenario. Here's the fix that worked for me:

  1. Open windows explorer <windows-key + e>
  2. If you're using OneDrive you should see something like "OneDrive - Personal" within the left-hand pane. If so, Right-Click to access the context-menu.
  3. You should see the menu-item: "Always keep on this device", select this.
  4. Recheck your desktop; no more brown boxes, yay!

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-02-13T10:19:35+00:00

    I confirm that setting the OneDrive to "Always keep on this device" did resolve the problem, however it created another one for me in that it used up the 250GB on spare space I had on my SSD drive.

    I had to uncheck it, it seems to be something to do the with the OneDrive synching, sometimes I get them, I also occasionally get red checks instead and then after sometime everything clears.

    I appreciate that OneDrive is doing some complicated stuff but if feels like it should be improved to allow proper management of the synching and better visualisation of how it is storing information between the cloud and the various multi-device desktops.

    Sharing information through onedrive feels very flaky.

    "Always keep on this device" causes onedrive to do something I assume make local copies of everything on Onedrive but what are the pros and cons and when you deselect it does it then clear all the local copies from the device or does it still retain some?

    In my case when I set Always keep on this device" I then started to get low disk space warnings, I then deselected it and after a day or so later I had recovered the space, but I have no idea what setting it and deselecting it actually did.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-02-13T20:11:05+00:00

    I'm a little late on the uptake, I know, but I opened the Task Manager, then restarted Windows Explorer, and they went away.

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-02-14T06:43:44+00:00

    I just had this problem occur this morning. I clicked the windows icon and searched OneDrive which i then opened. On the top left was OneDrive personal which I right clicked. I then clicked Show more options and chose to restore to previous version. I clicked the previous version and clicked apply and the boxes were removed completely.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-02-20T17:26:52+00:00

    Thank you!

    I hate Win11 and ABHOR OneDrive

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