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

want to sing in Microsoft office account

How long do I have to wait? Because I am facing the same problem right now

As of 2 days ago, I now have this problem – oddly, this is only occurring with 1 of the 2 folders that have been shared with me. It had been working fine for years, then 2 days ago, 1 folder appears as a link and deletes any of the files stored in that folder. As I am the owner fo all 3 OneDrive accounts, I had not changed anything settings-wise or even gone into the folders "sharing with" sections for there to be a change.

I am about to walk away from MS to be honest!!! Just witin the last 18 months or so, we have had to contend with the following:

• The upcoming forced termination of one of my fairly new PC’s that “doesn’t meet the criteria” to upgrade to Windows 11
• The way MS has been cramming CoPilot down our throats like MS is a face hugger and we’re Ripley in cryonic stasis on the Sulaco! With the immovable and frustratingly annoying prompts towards AI and the MS Word “Select the icon or press Alt + I to draft with CoPilot”.
• The ever-looming threat of deactivating Outlook Classic for a program with MUCH less functionality and riddled with bugs.

Seriously MS – sort ya sh*t out and get your act together, but I digress.

Going back to the issue at hand, 1 of 2 folders that have been shared with me, now appear as links in Explorer – why would this be? How long until a fix is pushed out?

Hi Vaughan,

The news is not great for you, if one of your shares has gone to a shortcut (and all local files deleted), I would assume/expect the other one to go the same way soon. For me, my issues started in March 2025, some have had this issue since June 2024 and with zero feedback from Microsoft it would seem on when this will all be resolved.

In this thread you will see people talking about MS migrating OneDrive from V1.0 to V2.0 and we need to wait for the migration to finish. Mine finally updated to V2.0 a few days ago, but there are no signs yet that the sync is working again. Supposedly you just need to wait and one day in the future it will all just work again.

When they delete your files and replace them with shortcuts, you see a massive increase in OneDrive activity (files being deleted) and obviously a slowing of your internet connection while this all happens. Then if what they say is true, magically it will all just be fixed with no action on our part. All those files they deleted will have to be downloaded again from the MS servers. So as people get reinstated, there would be a massive impact to MS servers and networks while millions of users download millions of files with Terabytes, even Petabytes of capacity. MS really seems to have shot themselves in the foot here (aside from user backlash about poor notification, communication in general, planning and design), because their migration is being slowed by the massive downloads back to users. i.e. the more they break, like yours, the more issues they are creating. i.e. why have they started on yours, when mine has not been working for 5 weeks (and there are many more people waiting longer than me)?

If they really had to migrate and move data from one system to another, why wouldn’t they have done this is batches and not start the next batch until the previous batch was completed. Poor planning, poor design!

With all my playing, reconfiguring, diagnostics, I’m now wondering if I have prevented the “auto magic recovery process” working. Still hoping at this stage it will spring back to life soon.