To those of you fellow sufferers who are in dire need of a feasible workaround (until MS get their act together):
Today I experimented with the command line tool rclone. It’s a versatile tool for mounting remote data sources and can also connect to Onedrive. It comes with an experimental (beta) „bisync“ option, which can bi-directionally synchronize remote and local folders. This finally became a temporary working solution for me!
(Besides syncing, mounting the remote folder is also a technical possibility with rclone that I tested, but this comes with some trade-offs: rclone cannot pre-cache files and data transfer is rather slow - but it might be an option if you don‘t want to store the whole folder locally)
These are the basic steps:
- setup rclone (copy into windows/system32)
- authorize it with your onedrive account (to access the shared folders, the .URLs need to be in place!)
- download your shared folder from the browser and copy it to your desired location (outside of your local Onedrive folder).
- set up the rclone „bisync“ command and schedule it to run periodically (in my case it takes 5min to complete with ~32GB and 46k files), so I schedule it to run every 15min.
Result: you have a local copy that will be bi-directionally kept in sync with your shared folder, the only downside is that it takes a little bit longer for changes to show up (and that the complete folder is stored locally, in my case this is what I wanted).