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

Hi Nadav,

It sounds like your OneDrive settings may have changed, possibly due to an update or a policy change in your organization. Here are a few steps you can try to restore local access to your shared folders:

1. Check OneDrive Files On-Demand Settings

• Click on the OneDrive icon in the system tray (bottom-right of your screen).
• Select Settings > Sync and Backup > Advanced settings.
• Look for the Files On-Demand option and turn it off if it’s enabled. This should force OneDrive to keep files available locally.

2. Re-Sync Shared Folders

• Open OneDrive Online and navigate to the shared folder.
• Click Add shortcut to My Files (if available).
• Then, go to your OneDrive folder on your PC, right-click, and select Sync from the OneDrive menu.

3. Check Storage and Permissions

• If the issue is with specific shared folders, ensure the owner hasn’t changed permissions or removed local sync access.
• If your storage is full, OneDrive may not sync new files locally.

4. Unlink and Relink OneDrive

• Right-click the OneDrive icon and go to Settings > Account > Unlink this PC.
• Restart your computer and sign back into OneDrive.
• Choose the folders you want to sync and ensure shared folders are selected.

If none of these steps work, let me know if you’re using a personal or business OneDrive account and if this happened after an update. I’ll try to assist further!

Best,
[Your Name]

I, too, have just succumbed to this defect. I and others in my family have free accounts dating back many years. Part of our workflow is to use a search tool, X1, to crawl our content to make finding things easier. Without a filesystem based access point, this all breaks.

As a point of interest, the night my account experienced the issue I was accessing content from a subfolder from another family member who was sharing their content. When I next looked at the top level folder of my account on my filesystem, it showed a URL link to the location that was originally a filesystem access point, as well as a folder that was now local with the original location name appended with my computer's name, whose only content, locally stored, was the folder and the file I was accessing with Word. This is the behavior I typically get when there is a sync issue and OneDrive creates a 'copy' with the computer's name appended.

I'm now waiting, like everyone else, for this to be fixed. In the meantime I've taken a backup of our collective OneDrive world and copied it over to Google Drive.

I don't think it's a region issue, although anything is possible. All my accounts are in the same region, and in the one that all the big companies are trying to avoid these days. I am fom Russia. However, my wife and daughter see shared folders between themselves, and mine are only shortcuts. I'm more inclined to think that Microsoft is simply converting users from one platform to another. It's clear that it's impossible to do this with all users at once, so the process is slow. At some point, they have to move everyone into a single space. Although this doesn't change the discontent of users who have experienced the problem. If I'm right, then I don't understand why they didn't write a small piece of code that could track a group of related users and move them at the same time, rather than leaving some of them perplexed for months!

Do you think this is a REGION DC thing? UK, Ireland, US etc?