I have been using Microsoft’s OneDrive service for a while. I am a macOS user and their macOS sync client wasn’t the best at first, but they mostly caught up over time. Unfortunately, they recently took a major step back as part of their “V2” upgrade that is making me rethink OneDrive.
About a week and a half ago, I noticed the OneDrive client was taking a lot of CPU and didn’t really seem to be doing much. It kept going and going without any obvious activity. I ended up restarting the computer to see if that resolved it and it did not. Eventually, I had to uninstall and reinstall the OneDrive sync client. After the reinstallation, everything seemed to be normal until I noticed that one of the folders shared with me was no longer a folder and instead a link “Shared Folder Name.url.”
Clicking on the url would open up the shared folder in the browser. Odd. I tried adding the account again and it did the same thing. I also noticed that I now had a folder with my computer’s name and some of the files from this shared folder. Something was obviously different.
A quick search brought me to this Microsoft Support thread from June 2024. At first sight, I thought this must not be it because it’s been almost a year old. I didn’t see the 2,800 replies (as of 5/1/2025) on that thread. I decided to call Microsoft Support who assured me that it was a known issue that they were working on. Supposedly, it has already been escalated. When I pointed to this thread that was a year old, they had no specific response other than that the team was working on it.
After the call, I looked more into the Support thread and finally noticed the 2,800 replies, many were even from a few days ago. The main takeaway? Just wait because they planned a bad backend upgrade from “V1” to “V2.” The folder was shared by a user in the same “Microsoft Family,” but their account has not been upgraded yet and the two versions are incompatible with each other.
How long until this will be fixed? No one has any idea and no one from Microsoft will say because even they don’t know themselves. But it can seemingly take more than a year for this to be fixed…
Sure, this is in regards to a “consumer” version of OneDrive, which I guess they don’t really care as much about. Apparently, the consumer versions of OneDrive (and Office 365?!) are treated so badly that Microsoft will break a key feature for many months without a resolution. The only thing you can do is wait.
I am going to give it another week and hope that somehow miraculously this will get fixed. I don’t have that much hope, though. After another week, it will be time to look for another product to replace OneDrive.
And this is how not to make your customers lose faith in your products.