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

Can you check the version of onedrive web?

Login to the main sharing account account ...click "gear" in the top right corner and click "settings"

Do you have version with "Search" or without?

Then login to the working account where there is no problem and check.

Then login to the not working account and check the same.

Give results if you can.

Then please share a folder to account that have the same "version"...and see if it works fine.

You are exactly right. I have just checked: I am using 3 versions of OneDrives:

• A: my main OneDrive, where I link the two others (B + C); A has no search
• B: has search
• C: has no search

Linking A+C is no problem, here the shared folders appear as folders. Linking A+B is a problem, here the folders appear as URLs.

Screenshots:

A & C look like this:

B looks like this:

However I just encountered a new problem. The cloud sync with my Synology now does not allow more than one version to sync that has "no search". It says, that there is already a connection with the same public cloud account, however they are two separate accounts of OneDrive. Things really got messed up!

However, the family plan of MS is still the cheapest way of acquiring 6TB of cloud storage. Google Drive or Dropbox cost up to 10x as much if you buy OneDrive family cards on Amazon sale.

I have the same issue since last weekend.

I wasted hours last Sunday to find the reason for this issue, until I found these forum posts confirming it’s a general issue.

Another issue since then is that when I open Office files from the local D:\OneDrive folders, they are opened a different way than before: if you look in the “Recent” files in Word or Excel, the path is now shown as “OneDrive of xyz >> “file.xlsx” instead of D: >> OneDrive >> file.xlsx (which is what I want and always was before).

A side effect of this behavior is that the folder path in the footer is now displayed as a URL, which I don’t want.

But the worst is that the timestamp is immediately updated to the current date/time, even without changing anything! (and of course the AutoSave slider is off)

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?

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.