Forum Discussion
Sharing the same file across different Onedrive Folders
You can create links or basically shortcuts that point to other files but you would manually have to do it. Clicking new in the folder you are in then link will allow you to paste a link to the source file.
ChrisWebbTech The logic for me is i'm an English teacher and all of my planning resources are on one-drive in subfolders. So, I have one folder for all of my texts and their related resources, but another folder for more general topics like genre or visual imagery. What I want to do is link a few key texts into my genre folder, so they're there for easy access if I am say looking at planning a genre study, but then also have them in my subfolder for texts in case I want to do them separately; but I can't just copy/ past the folder because when I add resources to it. For instance, if I am collecting resources for Frankenstein, I'd want them to appear in my Frankenstein subfolder under both the 'text' folder and the gothic horror sub folder of my genre folder, so when I am looking for ideas as to what to teach, I see Frankenstein as an option for a gothic horror genre study or a standalone novel study.
I've tried linking and that kind of works, but I also use One-drive on the desktop, and the link only takes you to the online browser and while that's not a deal-breaker, it would be good to move between linked folders as smoothly as you go between normal folders.
ChrisWebbTech The reason for wanting to share the same file in different folders is logical. We want to share some files with different people, but not all should have access to the same files. Some materials should go to my digital marketing team and some, but not all, to my franchisee partners, because the digital marketing team must edit some of them. I don't understand why someone would ask the question of why would you want that. The question and the need is there. What we are looking for is the answer, not another person asking us to explain why. Thank you for everyone's contribution to this very important need. It also takes up more storage space to have the same multi-gigabyte folders saved in 3-4 places. As the original poster mentioned, Google Drive makes it very easy, but Microsoft makes most things difficult.
Marc_1056 Simple, asking why, helps understand the problem to offer alternative solutions by understanding the requirement.
I want to share a single file (as read/write) with a particular Android app, without giving that app access to my entire OneDrive. Here's where App folders come in handy. Nevertheless, I do use that file outside of the app too.
It would be great to be able to share that file inside the specific App folder for that Android app.
Folder based file systems exist so that users can explore data when they don't know that it exists, so this is necessarily not about the situation where users already have a link to the file.
Hierarchical file systems where a file can appear in only one folder limit how many categories that file can belong to - a tree structure. Allowing files to appear in more than one folder allows it to have multiple categories, which may be more convenient for searchers.
I've tried to use Shortcuts to achieve something like this, BUT the created shortcut uses the exact local file system path and not the OneDrive path, so the shortcuts don't work on my laptop for example when created on my desktop PC. It would be great if this could be fixed.
- That’s basically what right clicking a file and share then copy and anyone link if others need it or a “existing access link” for yourself. Then use this as your shortcut either in web or create a new short cut and use the URL you got.
Our company recently migrated from Google to OpenDrive. Google Drive does support checking the same file into multiple folders. We adopted this practice as each department organizes their folder tree differently but in essence access in some cases the same files and artifacts. This practice improves collaboration while still giving each team or department the freedom to organize files as they see fit.
mhettenkofer. Yes, same here and I really miss that option. It would also be useful for Teams as I want my colleagues to have access to the files in Teams they do not need to be part of. If I produce documents in the large central Team but need quick access in my student Teams I want to be using the same document, not a copy.
