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

After about 3 months of waiting for my system to migrate, I decided to see if I could help speed things along. I am not sure if what I did helped, but after doing this my account was migrated in about 2-3 days, so maybe it might be an option for others who can do the same. I hope this longwinded story/guide might help at least a few people accelerate their migration as I think it helped mine. Make sure you understand the steps below and that you have adequate backups of your files inplace before attempting.

I only use OneDrive as a secondary backup of my photos from my desktop (about 160 GB), sharing documents with others (about 8 GB), and

for autodownloading my Camera Roll from my phone to my Desktop. I normally have OneDrive set to sync all files to my computers and not just stored in the cloud for this exact reason of not trusting ANYONE with my primary copy of my files, especially Microsoft these days. I have been doing a lot of changes to my Desktop's photos daily so I think it could never finish processing the move over to v2.0 on the backend because I kept modifying files. I decided if there was nothing in OneDrive for it to process, maybe it might sync faster if I removed EVERYTHING ?!?

So Thursday (5/22/25) I used the gear icon in my Desktop's and Laptop's apps, and selected 'Pause syncing, Quit OneDrive'. With the OneDrive apps closed, I MOVED everything out of the OneDrive folders to a new temp folder on both systems. Then I went to the OneDrive webpage deleted all my files and all of my shares. (Had to let my clients know we would have to re-setup multiple years of shares, which sucks). Once the files and shares were deleted in the OneDrive webpage, I emptied the Recycle Bin in the OneDrive webpage.

Once the OneDrive completed emptying the Recycle Bin in the webpage which took about an hour, I then monitored my phone's OneDrive app and watched as it synced up to match deletion of the files from the webpage which took about another hour to complete. I waited about another 2 hours just to allow anything that might be happening behind the scenes on the servers to finish up after the deletions.

Next I restarted the OneDrive apps on my Desktop and Laptop and left the little popup window on screen so I could watch as both systems processed the changes from the deletes. Both systems took about 2 hours but they finally both completed syncing and all three of my devices were synced up with hardly any files left (the OneNote link and the default Documents folder which never seems to go away). So I left both systems on for a couple of days and yesterday (5/25/25) I checked the OneDrive webpage options, and the Search option at the bottom was missing!!! (which is one way to see if your account has been migrated over).

So soon as I am done typing this, I will be moving all the files from the temp folder on my Desktop back into their place in my OneDrive folder and allow it to sync back up to OneDrive. Because there has been several days and Desktop has probably changed a lot of the accessed dates in the file properties of my photos, I am going to allow OneDrive to push my files back down to my laptop from the cloud. If I tried to move the files from my Laptop's temp folder into my Laptop's OneDrive folder, there could be version conflicts when things try to sync, and I could end up with a big mess. So, once I have verified the files have successfully synced to the cloud and back to my Laptop, then I will delete the extra copy of my files from my Laptop's temp folder.

Good luck to everyone!

After six months, I was migrated finally.

I do not know if it helped, but I removed all shared files / links one month before migration.

I did not move any files, I just removed shared.

But since I waited for six months, it probably does not matter.

New back-end seems to have better syncing capabilities. Also, shared folders now appears normally in Explorer, like folders, but they have clear mark that it is shared folder, which is helpful.

Why MS took so long and did not informed users remains open question...

help me to fix it

Everyting normal again! After................................ 13 (THIRTEEN) months waiting.