Forum Discussion
Remove "Add shortcut to OneDrive" from Sharepoint Sites
Deleting shortcuts from your OneDrive does not delete shared files within Teams channels or SharePoint Online sites so all shared files are safe.
You can keep all your Teams channels and SharePoint Online sites in one place using File Explorer.
Moving to another PC will only require you to sign-in to your OneDrive account and all your shortcuts will be intact.
I agree that the experience is better IF they only every try to sync that one location.
The problem comes in that they don't understand that syncing Folder C from folder A > B > C means that they now can't sync B or A.
What would be ideal (to my mind) would be something like folder
C added as shortcut, and try to add folder B or A, and so the client just moves everything and includes the NEW whole filepath requested - and B (and C) or A (and B>C are all synced at the highest requested folder level synced.
Right now, if you add Shortcuts to the OneDrive, it also prevents SharePoint sites showing up as separate entries, which I feel is a MUCH cleaner experience for the users to FIND the files and understand where they are saved into.
For Example last week I had users who didn't understand why everything was saved "into their OneDrive" but "copies" were "also saved in" the SharePoint sites.
They were trying to CLEAN UP the "Extra" OneDrive copies!
These of course weren't ACTUALLY copies or extra, but they had SHORTCUTS INTO the SharePoint sites, and were actively deleting important files and causing chaos in their organization.
The versioning systems let us restore things fine, but they had no idea the shortcuts were linking things.
Cleared out the shortcuts, and set them up with separately synced libraries and now it was obvious WHERE things were stored!
- This is so true. I'm very often seeing people with shortcuts in their OneDrive and they don't even know how it got there. And like someone else said in the thread, when you try to delete that shortcut, sometimes the "Delete shortcut" in Explorer does nothing, and other times deleting the shortcut deletes everything that shortcut leads to. It happened to me at least twice where I had to restore a whole Team from the bin.
I am currently in the process of disabling Teams sync for all my clients (keeping just their OneDrive). So far so good, but I now need to remove both the Sync and Add shortcut to OneDrive buttons. Microsoft sure ain't making it easy for people who want to go 100% cloud only with no sync.
