OneDrive – Shared folders can no longer sync locally since yesterday

I regret to see this event unfold, but I have seen before how a problem is handled by Microsoft, such as this onea few years back about tags in OneDrive. It appeared that the ability to create tags for photos in OneDrive suddenly disappeared. Moderators chimed in as well as people relaying results from calling Microsoft that "they are aware of the issue," that "engineers were deployed," that "Microsoft understands the concern," and that "the problem would be soon resolved." It never happened. I recommended to people that for those where tags were important, to pick a date (I suggested the start of the next month from my comment) where if it was not resolved, to find another service or in-house solution. That day came and went, and no solution at the time was provided. I checked in 6mo later and still no solution.

Microsoft is a large company with vast resources and intelligent people. Professional development goes through a development environment, then testing and finally provisions for rollback. They would not deploy a change to the entire user population in one go. If they didn't follow due process, then you would wonder if you should rely on them in the future for your cloud storage.

This sort of thing is unlikely to happen by chance. Dropbox has been shared cloud files on the desktop without flaw, and I'm sure it is a simple thing that Microsoft can handle. I wonder if this is how they get people either to stop using the feature to free up their resources or to pay a premium without having to announce it. We just renewed our M365 subscription for a 38% increase (CPI here was 2.4% for 2024) and today received a notice telling us Skype calls and Publisher are being cancelled (so reduced value) and now no more inclusion of shared folders with File Explorer.

I would recommend you adopt the same approach that I recommended with the tags issue. Pick a date after which you will search for a new service and move your files. You could wait indefinitely, wasting time. The longer it goes, the more solid the demonstration that your files are in an unreliable place if they don't follow best practices. (It's a shared folder this time—what's next?) For some, this is not too critical, so they'll wait a couple months; others need this now and will pick the end of the month at most.

I have to now deal with a client who just signed up their business and asks me for help with secure file storage. What do I tell them?

Why is a shared OneDrive folder not syncing to my pc? - Microsoft Community Its been way longer than a month. No solution in sight. In fact, the problem seems to have spread to all computers using sharing over one drive.

Just visit the web experience of Onedrive and select settings/options. If the last entry in the options menu blade is "Search Onedrive" your account is V1, if it is the option to recover, you are V2.

So from reading through this thread, and other searches, it appears that MS are doing a backend migration of OneDrive servers which breaks the ability to have Shared Folders syncing locally...at least while the connected OneDrive's are on different versions of the backend.

Supposedly presenting a web link is intended behaviour while backends are out of alignment and it will automatically fix itself once main + shared folder are hosted on the same backend version 😔🤞

Apparently this has been happening (so I guess that's how long the migration has been taking!) for some people since at least June 2024 Why is a shared OneDrive folder not syncing to my pc? - Microsoft Community

Official info about this currently in the 'Important' box of Add shortcuts to shared folders in OneDrive - Microsoft Support

I hope that consolidated info proves useful to others who find this reply

This is a totally unacceptable situation and the blatant arrogant and disrespectful silence from any human entity within Microsoft on this URGENT matter ---needs some more signficantly effective way to acheive a response!!

Due to operational reasons i am now changing suppliers and will seek a full refund of a stupid un-Intelligent system that seems unfixable and whose operators are disgustingly silent!!