"The folder you tried to unselect contains the windows documents folder, which is an important folder in windows and is currently pointed to Onedrive"

Anonymous
2023-09-06T05:02:28+00:00

When I try to unsync any folder, this error message appears:

"The folder you tried to unselect contains the windows documents folder, which is an important folder in windows and is currently pointed to Onedrive"

This is a new thing that started happening over the weekend, as I use OneDrive on a daily basis.

Rebuilding all the folders and subdirectories are not an option since they are time-consuming and there is not enough space on my local drive (which is why I am using OneDrive and turning folders on and off).

Microsoft, please sort this out.

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-09-12T03:54:28+00:00

    Thanks Ramon. And this only started happening in the last two weeks for you as well?

    The technician said moving the OneDrive folder out of Documents will solve the issue, but it still doesn't answer the question of why this only started recently.

    You could do that if you don't have a lot of linked files.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-09-12T04:04:26+00:00

    For my use case, I found a work around, which was to make a new folder and move the files I wanted to sync into that folder, however that didnt actually fix the real issue as I still had to go into the onedrive storage and delete the duplicate files so they would keep trying to sync to the documents folder...

    I only noticed this behavior a few days ago but it could have been happening for the past few weeks.

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  3. Craig Long 18,630 Reputation points
    2023-09-12T04:54:22+00:00

    Yes, I can't uncheck any folders within the Documents, Desktop, Pictures, Music, or Videos folders.

    However, I can uncheck the manila folders that are outside of those folders and within OneDrive.

    So if you want to uncheck folders and still keep them in OneDrive you will need to move folders out of those locations.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-09-12T06:53:21+00:00

    I am having the same problem. Previously you could deselect a folder inside the documents folder. Because there are also software that uses folders inside documents, which I do not want to sync between devices as they take up too much space and I dont use the same software on every device.

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-09-13T03:45:30+00:00

    The problem seems that onedrive "Hijacks" your documents folder. Then when you go into settings backup and then deselect documents from backup. All your files in your documents folder dissapear.

    Then you need to redownload your documents folder in onedrive to your pc.

    After you can delete the files in your onedrive.

    But all in all I think onedrive is becoming much worse to use, now how to add a folder to onedrive?

    It should be simple to use, select which folder you want to backup and thats it. You could simply right click add folder to onedrive. But the way it works is really weird

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