A shared folder in one drive, cannot be synced to explorer. Option no longer available

Anonymous
2024-06-17T23:34:45+00:00

Good morning,

I am an experienced IT professional.

I have already confirmed permissions to one drive folders are fine.

And, one drive has been reinstalled etc.

The account in question is just a free outlook.com account.

Issue - You used to be able to see a sync option on the web access for any shared folders.

The folder was shared from another free one drive account.

This is no longer there.

I can add a shortcut, that is all.

And while the user can in indeed click on the shortcut to access files, the access is ONLY web access.

From my reading of other blogs, I assume that Microsoft no longer allow one drive free to sync shared folders to explorer?

And I need to advise my client to move to sharepoint. - or, a 365 business account.

Thank you.

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-03-04T20:00:55+00:00

    Of course. The folder is there - marked as being shared from someone.

    The same appears on windows explorer but just a shortcut

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-03-04T19:45:16+00:00

    Still not working for me ...

    If I look in OneDrive > Settings > Account I can see all my personal files and folders that are backed-up and syncing with OneDrive. That bit is working fine and I can 'share' data between my PC and laptop as normal.

    There is no sign of any shared folder at that point.

    I first noticed that 'something was wrong' when I spotted the entirety of my share folder structure in the Recycle Bin. Perhaps foolishly I attempted to recover it from there which Windows did but in doing so created an unshared copy in my personal OneDrive space.

    OneDrive seems to have fallen back to be 'personal' only - no longer supporting shared data.

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-03-04T17:36:55+00:00

    Still not working for me. Out of curiosity, if you open your Onedrive client and go to Account - Choose folders, do you correctly see the shared folders in there too?

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  4. Anonymous
    2025-03-04T05:23:20+00:00

    UPDATE - Suddenly without any MS updates being applied, my OneDrive syncing of our shared folder tree is WORKING AGAIN. See the snip below. Today, March 3, 2025 about 10:30am pacific time, our shared folder tree is again shown in File Manager. Before the failure, the header shared folder used to be called "Documents 1", but now is called "Documents - 's files".

    So, I will be the happiest guy if this syncing of our shared data tree stays in effect since this is the way OneDrive has worked for us for many years.

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  5. Anonymous
    2025-03-03T15:13:03+00:00

    Same issue here. MS clearly forced an update to Onedrive that hit my account last week. Now I find all our family shared folders are missing on our home "server" and online only. Can't sync all our family photos anymore. Time to look at other cloud providers, even though we've had MS365 and extra Onedrive storage for years. Shared folder sync is a required function for us. MS just keeps applying the "Windows Phone" attitude toward all their products - having a great product and intentionally killing it so customers leave them.

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