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
    2025-03-03T05:00:12+00:00

    I experience the same issue. One of our windows users is having this problem for months now. Since last week other Windows and MacOS users are also affected.

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-02-28T17:52:12+00:00

    Not just 'newer' accounts. I set-up the share in 2016. It worked just fine until 26/27 February 2025. Microsoft have changed 'something' to break a working system.

    In our case, the shared folder comes via a Microsoft 365 subscription ...

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    3 people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2025-02-28T06:26:55+00:00

    OneDrive sync suddenly failing. Yes, this just happened to our Strata shared folders on Sunday February 23rd.  We have a master Strata PC with a folder tree of all our strata documents which we share to specific councilors so they can update files, add files, and generally work with the OneDrive files synced down to their local PCs.

    This is SUDDENLY broken and our whole workflow is completely disrupted.  We are not that experienced with reporting issues to Microsoft Support.  I have written a complaint into the OneDrive Feedback link, but have no idea if that feedback will make it to HIGH priority.

    I have used OneDrive for years and loved our ability to keep our master database of files and folders up-to-date through OneDrive's backup and sync functionality.

    I had just bought a new desktop PC and upgraded it to Windows 24H2 on December 21, 2024.  I only had one tiny issue with Malwarebytes that they had a fix for.  OneDrive was working perfectly as always until Sunday morning Feb 23, 2025 when I noticed all my local PC folders for the Shared master PC were missing.  We are desperately trying to figure out how to work around this problem.

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  4. Anonymous
    2025-02-27T19:32:20+00:00

    This is still happening in February 2025. Apparently randomly, btw. I have one instance of onedrive that is affected, and one that is not affected (yet) but stuck in "processing changes".

    It's ridiculous that such a bug can persist for so long. There must be some kind of workaround.

    Also please go on the community site and upvote this one and this one.

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    2 people found this answer helpful.
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  5. Anonymous
    2025-02-26T16:26:22+00:00

    Shared folder cannot be accessed / sync thru file explorer.

    Big problem as my client is trying to switch to one drive from Box.

    If this problem cannot be fixed, we have to return back to box.

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