OneDrive shared folders are now links, not folders! How do I fix this?

Anonymous
2025-03-04T11:55:09+00:00

I have a number of folders shared with me by other OneDrive users. I've added these to My Files to appear alongside the folders on my OneDrive account. Up until yesterday, they appeared as folders on my PC, alongside the other folders which belong to my OneDrive account. Now these folders that are shared with me are appearing as shortcut links instead of folders on my PC.

This has happened to 3 different PCs which are all connected to the same OneDrive account. I have uninstalled OneDrive, cleared the cache, etc. and reinstalled on one PC, but the problem remains. I've removed shared folders, had them unshared by the owner, reshared back to me, and then added again to My Files, but this didn't work either.

How do I fix this?

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-05-04T19:02:38+00:00

    I have shared files from two other accounts, one of them never turned into links, but the other one has finally returned to shared folders in Explorer like it was before. Seems it's just taking time but definitely returning back to the way it was. Overall, this was terribly handed.

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-05-03T15:27:11+00:00

    Hi guys

    some things have changed. For example, now it is possible to delete the url files of shared folders and then go back to "shared" section and try to add them to Onedrive as folders and not as url links. I'm doing this test practically every two days: I delete the url file whenever I found them, go to shared, add links to my drive and add them back to my onedrive. Before I couldn't do it, it always gave an error. Now there are two scenarios: either it goes back as a url link or as a real folder. If you are lucky and you are in the second, maybe Onedrive locally takes a while to receive this change, but if A) the shared folder goes back as a folder and not as a url and B) you don't have to continuously work locally like me and you can afford a restore with its long times, running

    %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\onedrive.exe /reset

    or alternatively

    C:\Program Files\Microsoft OneDrive\onedrive.exe /reset

    can also bring the folders back to the local disk.

    BE PATIENT: if you have a lot of files, resetting onedrive can take a very very very long time, especially if you have a lot of files to "physically" sync (i.e. to download locally).

    Last... we changed the way we share our family folders: no more so many shares (based on the topic), but only one "giant" share per account. At the moment it is certainly more inconvenient, but as the situation recovers it allows us not to have to make dozens of clicks for this operation.

    I hope it can be of help, bye

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-05-03T15:15:24+00:00

    Hi Dan

    I had the same problem and, one account at a time, it seems to return to normalilty... a bit too slow but, wow, I hope I will forget this ****. I had the same doubt as you: to solve it I did a comparison of the folders. Example, the FOLDERA folder on my computer called NUC16 and I had:

    • FOLDERA (the folder that just restored)
    • FOLDERA_NUC16 (the folder that was "left" phisically synchronized)

    I used FreeFileSync to compare only date/size: I saw that there were only a part of the files (about 20%) and that they matched in modify date and size. So I deleted the FOLDERA_NUC16 folder.

    Remember that the remnants of the folder are only there because you decided, as I did, to physically synchronize the files and have them available offline: what is missing is because it was not synchronized (and they were available only with internet connection).

    hope this helps, bye

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  4. Anonymous
    2025-05-03T11:18:11+00:00

    Did you actively take any steps on any of the shared accounts or they just reverted back to proper synched folders? None of ours are working.

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  5. Anonymous
    2025-05-03T10:26:04+00:00

    I'm pleased to report my OneDrive is now fixed. Hopefully the same will be true for everyone else soon.

    At the start of the issue, the system created a duplicate folder named after the computer attempting to sync the shared folder. How was this resolved? Were the folders merged, or was the duplicate removed?

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