OneDrive shared folder shortcut stopped working as expected

Anonymous
2025-02-23T05:20:55+00:00

Update #2:

Found another thread that seem to be talking about the same issue: Issue with OneDrive Desktop App - Shared Folders Became Web Links

But none of them seem to provide solution to this problem.

Update:

Looks like there is already a post about this exact same issue; I don't know how I missed it when I was searching for existing issues. Anyway, here is the link: OneDrive shared folders are now a url shortcut (I need to fix it) - Microsoft Community

Found another one: Folders Shared with me are syncing as internet shortcut in OneDrive on - Microsoft Community

Looks like the issue is still active and there hasn't been any solution to it yet.

Hi there,

I have a shared folder from someone that I collaborate with and I use "Add shortcut to My Files" option so add the shortcut so that I can access it from my Explorer. This has been working great until yesterday. Starting yesterday, I stopped seeing the folder completely from my explorer; instead, I see an entry with the same name with type "Internet Shortcut". When I open it, a new browser instance opens and takes me to the OneDrive website. On the web interface, it opens the folder correctly.

Here are some screenshots:

In shared, I see the folder named "1-...", which is the folder that was shared to me. I then click the ... to open the menu and click "Add shortcut to My Files".

The folder is added correctly in My Files but it has the "shortcut" looking icon attached to the folder icon. Click the link takes me to the folder correctly.

In the explorer, however, it's showing up as "Internet Shortcut".

And therefore, I cannot access the content of that folder directly.

This seems to be a behavior change that I cannot rollback. It was very useful to be able to access the shared folder from explorer so I can read/write files directly from the app instead of having to download/download. Is this expected change?

Expected behavior:

A folder is created with name matching the shared folder name. Opening the folder shows the content of the folder.

Files can be read and write as if they were local files.

Actual behavior:

An "Internet shortcut" is created. Opening the shortcut takes me to the OneDrive page.

Files cannot be read and write directly.

Thanks in advance.

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-03-04T01:03:14+00:00

    Why did you share a temporarily solution via Private Message to that customer instead of publicly here? Many of us, myself included, need to fix it too. I have several hundred of GB of files that were removed from my local drive and I can't find a way to fix it.

    I saw other comments about using it as a network drive as a temporary solution. The problem is that we lose our local copy of the file if we do that. I have a feeling that using that network location to manually copy the files locally might be impractical if you have several hundred GB spread across hundreds of thousands of files.

    Any chance we can get a solution soon?

    Help is appreciated. Thanks!

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-03-03T16:01:17+00:00

    I have just started having this problem. Does anyone have a solution yet?

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-03-02T23:12:15+00:00

    I was playing around with it and observed the following:

    Where Icon When clicked
    Web Opens the folder in the same explorer window and shows list of contents.
    Windows Opens the browser and navigates to the OneDrive page and says "InvalidResourceId".
    iOS Opens the folder in iOS app and shows subset number of files. The folder has 37 items but iOS only shows 4.

    Hope this helps with the investigation.

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  4. Anonymous
    2025-02-28T22:49:46+00:00

    Based on the private message I got from the engineer and the instruction from here: Map OneDrive as Network Drive: Simplified Setup Guide - MyWorkDrive, I was able to map the OneDrive as a network drive and access files that way. You don't need any extra software; it simply maps as a network drive. It probably doesn't provide things like version conflict and whatnot, but at least it works for me while waiting for the OneDrive team to fix the issue.

    If you are having the same problem, gives this method a try and see if it works for you.

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  5. Anonymous
    2025-02-28T11:43:44+00:00

    Hi,

    Many users here, including myself, are experiencing this OneDrive sync issue, and it’s becoming a major roadblock to our workflow. This is seriously impacting our collaboration and causing significant delays.

    Can we get an update on what’s causing the problem and whether we can expect a fix soon? Should we still rely on OneDrive for our work, or should we start looking into alternatives like Google Drive to avoid these kinds of critical disruptions?

    We really need clear communication on this. Looking forward to your response.

    Thanks.

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