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

The next phase of the 'update' appears to have happened for me last night - OneDrive (Microsoft) has deleted the links to the shared folders that were put in place of the synchronised folders so that I now have no access to the shared files from Explorer. The Internet shortcuts are now sitting in the Recycle Bin while OneDrive tries to process the [two] changes - it has been sat for hours today [not] doing that ...

... and, after two weeks apparently doing nothing, my shared folders are back within Explorer as they should be.

Well, almost, since the files that were permanently resident on my hard drive were now directly accessible on the cloud - just another 8GB synchronisation to get things back properly.

So, in conclusion, Microsoft broke it and are quietly and slowly, without admitting anything, fixing it - we are only users / customers after all ...

Thank you for the detailed summary, Mark.

However, I want to emphasize that this change has severely impacted professional users who rely on shared folder sync for their daily workflow.

I'm a OneDrive Family subscriber and just renewed for 5 more years. My work depends on accessing shared folders locally — especially for media production, where files are opened directly in editing software. Now that shared folders are just .url links, my tools can't access anything, and this completely breaks my workflow.

This isn’t just a cosmetic issue. It's a major functional regression that should not be treated as a low-priority bug. At the very least, Microsoft should give users a toggle to enable local sync for shared folders again.

Please escalate this to the appropriate product team. If this remains unchanged, I will be forced to move to another service that still supports full shared folder syncing, like Google Drive or Dropbox.

Thanks for listening — but we really need a fix.

recently i found that if you have business account, they still offer this facility to sync with windows explorer. so may be in family subscription, they have taken out this facility so that they can sell more of business.

My understanding from reading around is that the issue has arisen from Microsoft migrating users from the original OneDrive platform to the SharePoint platform (for consolidation and longer-term support). I suspect that the synchronisation issue exists while shared and sharer are on different platforms - I could easily be wrong. However, if we wait patiently for long enough (for Microsoft to move both shared and sharer to the same platform) normal and proper synchronisation is automatically restored. It was for me / us ...

I'm not excusing Microsoft's poor performance - just offering hope!

That’s what I’m starting to suspect too. If this feature is still available for Business users, then removing it from Personal/Family plans without any warning feels like a move to push upgrades, which is frustrating for loyal paying users.