Folders Shared with me are syncing as internet shortcut in OneDrive on Windows PC

EDIT: After 1 1/2 days trying to solve the problem, folders are back with Shared status and proper url-links attached... It just happened while writing my comment. However, I was a bit worried when 10Gb of important files were not accessible even if they used to be stored locally.

This problem appeared on my computer recently. Existing desktop folders stopped working. I tried to re-link them in web-onedrive, where shared folders were accessible under shared-tab, but were not visible in My files any more. At first the desktop folders were replaced with url-links, but after some time, renaming and deleting shared folders and undoing this, one out of three folders returned to shared folder whereas two others turned into private folders. The shared folder has url-link in web-onedrive when you open its settings, but two others don't and it is impossible to add link. Trying to re-share folders function does not send email for activating these previously shared folders. The difference with folders turned into private is that they are a lot bigger in size.

Another thing I noticed, sharing folders from personal 365 onedrive to corporate onedrive is not working. Curiously, in the corporate web-onedrive there are functions in settings' main menu not available in personal onedrive, like Restore and Sync. Restore can be found under further settings, but 2FA is not working properly and restore cannot be used (to see if it would help, but I doubt it - I tried re-linking onedrive and resetting it etc. already).

Possibly unrelated, but when using Office apps on desktop, whenever I try to "Save as" a file opened from onedrive, the local file path is changed into https://d.docs.live.net -url when browsing folder, which I find annoying.

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I don’t want to go off-topic, but I’ll share how I ended up adopting OneDrive.

I never liked the fact that it doesn’t let me choose any folder I want for backup. Instead, I have to put everything inside the OneDrive folder.

Microsoft removed the integration of other cloud services in Office 365, so I’m forced to use OneDrive.

OneDrive forces you to back up folders like Desktop, Music, and Documents, and if you unlink your account from the computer, everything disappears.

Going beyond the topic, I can’t install Windows 11 on my i7-7700 because my computer is “too old.”

They also make it difficult to use VirtualBox, requiring a bunch of workarounds just to use a virtual machine—something that’s actually a built-in feature of the processor.

This is getting frustrating.

Everything appears to disappear on your computer screen because you switched from viewing the Desktop folder in the OneDrive folder to viewing the Desktop folder in File Explorer (not in the cloud), which may be empty.

You can get the Windows 365 virtual cloud PC that should work on an old device, but it's not free. You would need a business account to do so.

I don’t want to go off-topic, but I’ll share how I ended up adopting OneDrive.

I never liked the fact that it doesn’t let me choose any folder I want for backup. Instead, I have to put everything inside the OneDrive folder.

Microsoft removed the integration of other cloud services in Office 365, so I’m forced to use OneDrive.

OneDrive forces you to back up folders like Desktop, Music, and Documents, and if you unlink your account from the computer, everything disappears.

Going beyond the topic, I can’t install Windows 11 on my i7-7700 because my computer is “too old.”

They also make it difficult to use VirtualBox, requiring a bunch of workarounds just to use a virtual machine—something that’s actually a built-in feature of the processor.

This is getting frustrating.

Maybe they're intentionally breaking the feature for people who use it, maybe they're leaving heavier users at the bottom of the migration schedule, whatever they're doing, it's clearly intentional, it's a large issue, it affects many of us, it has very specific features that only benefit them while harming us and it also induces people to pay for upgrades they don't really need, accidentally, when those folders are duplicated on the guest's account.

This sound too much of a manicured problem that's a design feature, not a defect. Just something undocumented like your ISP throttling their top 10% users, for example, who actually pay for 1 Gbps because they actually want to use it while using as many resources as 20 "regular profitable users" that pay extra for all those features only to watch YouTube videos (I do that most of the time to, but you get my point).

It is very likely they could have made a mistake first, but then saw a spike on support requests associated with increased sales.

It does not take to be a genius to design this issue "from scratch" though. They are streamlining their operations to keep what's most profitable.

They might, indeed, cut this service and say not enough people were using it or even gas light us saying they never had such functionality and that we always had to use the web to access shared folders LOL.

Also, even using their web interface we can NOT copy files from one side to the other.

Anyways, it's ok. That's life. Accept what we can change, right?

I'll adjust my usage accordingly if necessary. The feature was very important to me but I can surely workaround. Where there's a will, there's a way.

I don't think they'd go as far as claim whatever we do to bypass the issue is against their terms of service because they're clearly on paper saying they're working to FIX it. Even if they might not be (or doing it slowly, who knows).

Maybe their target are small businesses that might share a large folder with many users that aren't even paid subscribers. Perhaps that's their major target and we're "conspiracing away" a bit beyond what they want to do. Specially considering it's only natural family users would want to share folders between themselves. That's the only use I had for it when starting, only moved to have more than one because they refused to sell larger plans back then.

I don't think it's fair to double the price when you get 2 TB, or quintuple if you get 5 TB. It's not even the same rate since 1x = 6TB, not 1TB and that would also mean they are valuing their Office Suite and other services at zero.