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

You are wasting your time with a ticket. Nonsensical and useless advice

We have MS 365 with a family group. All of the people who have the same "version" of the online OneDrive (see below) can properly share folders. All folder sharing between two different versions of the online OneDrive result in shared folders being url links.

I saw another poster ask about the same version of the online OneDrive. I never realized there could be different online version of OneDrive. From what have seen, the way to tell the different versions is:

1. Log onto the web version of OneDrive.
2. Click the gear icon in the upper right.
3. click the "options".

4a. If your last option listed on the right of the window says "Search" then you have one version of OneDrive online.

4b. If your last option listed on the right of the window says "Restore your OneDrive" then you have another version of the online OneDrive.

My experience is that shared folder work properly only between accounts with the same version of the online OneDrive. Not sure why, could be just coincidence. *shrug*

It's a waste of time. They told me to use the feedback form as if I were asking for a feature and not for them to solve a problem.

The fact this topic is being entirely ignored by them shows they don't care or that it's intentional.

It's interesting this only happened with large folders with several hundred GB but not with smaller ones (at least here).

They're well aware people use these shares to overcome the 1 TB storage limit. And it's something their own support always told us to do because we weren't able to purchase more space (at least before).

They should not just change things at their will without sending us very clear notifications and without implementing the "transition" in a way their software asks us what WE want done to OUR files.

Instead, they deleted my local copy of 3 large folders and replaced them with those url links.

They already removed support for REFS and symbolic links. I was forced to buy a 2 TB SSD because I could not point large folders that don't need high performance to a hard drive while maintaining everything else on a smaller SSD I owned.

They don't support their own REFS for OneDrive, even though it's far more efficient and, in theory, reliable.

We are paying customers. 99% of the reason why I took and kept an office subscription was to use OneDrive. Office suites are available for free, there's more than one open source alternative available.

Their support keeps gas lighting us. They act as if they have no clue about their own product and they can't do anything but give us "turn it off and back on again and see if it works, if not, factory reset or erase all your files and start from zero".

Enshitification is getting worse at accelerated pace. They'll be happy dumping their top 20% users while keeping people that cost them much less.

Keep the best 80% customers, make 20% of the effort. There's something about the 80/20 rule we are supposed to apply to our lives and they're doing the same.

There's competitors all over the world for cloud storage, though. But Microsoft clearly wants "bad users" like us to become someone else's problem.

I am using the opportunity to update my local backups. I am likely not renewing my subscription, unless I see an official reply from a Microsoft Developer here on this topic with a SOLUTION to the problem, not an excuse or a generic message that's entirely unaware and clearly posted by someone that doesn't understand our question.

A massive corporation like Microsoft surely has staff that's more than capable to come here and be honest and upfront. If they don't want us to synchronize shared folders, they should tell us that so we know we aren't able to rely on that feature moving forward.

Also, if a family plan has 6 TB of storage those 6TB should be flexible instead of 1 TB per account. That way we could just have all files together on a single account instead of working a maze of shares. It's 2025 and 1 TB is surely not a massive amount of space. I don't even have 4K video, I can't even imagine how you deal with it if you have expensive phones recording massive video files.

Maybe you are right.

According to your description, I have a different version of online OneDrive for two accounts.

Unfortunately, uninstalling and reinstalling OneDrive locally did not affect the online version of OneDrive.

The question is, how to unify the online versions of OneDrive?