"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
    2024-04-02T09:10:02+00:00

    This is still happening; it is still (incorrectly) saying that every sub-folder is THE documents folder are can't be unchecked (same with Pictures subfolders, etc).

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-11-22T18:23:01+00:00

    Microsoft wants you to become a paying subscriber for sure. (I'm trying to say this nicely)

    This is happening with OneDrive for business - it's bundled with sharepoint and teams and such. Not sure how much more of a paying customer we can become as an organization.

    This has suddenly become a huge issue - I have a new machine I need to migrate to, and after signing in to onedrive, it is forcing me to download everything from onedrive, and I still get the "Can't stop syncing folder" message when selecting the folders I want.

    Why is this an issue? Because my onedrive is filled with about 1TB of files and my local machine only has a 475GB drive.

    Either I'm supposed to let my local drive fill up and leave my machine unusable, or I have to stop the sync and only access files through the browser.

    In what world is this acceptable?

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  3. 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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  4. Craig Long 18,630 Reputation points
    2023-09-06T21:13:30+00:00

    If you uncheck "Make all files available" and then recheck everything except what you don't want checked might work but awkward.

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  5. Craig Long 18,630 Reputation points
    2023-09-06T20:41:29+00:00

    I'm seeing the same thing in my OneDrive. I cannot uncheck any folders either. I'll try to report the problem to Microsoft.

    In the meantime you can use the Files On-Demand to free up local storage space.

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