Windows C Drive and Documents Folder

Question

I have an HP Spectre laptop purchased about a year ago, running Windows 10. 

*Short version*

The documents folder directly under This PC (where I have been saving everything) and the documents folder under the pathway This PC > Windows (C:) > Users > [user] are no longer connected/synced/linked together. This happened a couple months ago. So many of my programs (such as Anaconda) access the documents folder through the latter pathway, while everything I saved was in the former (I only noticed this when I continued to save documents to the former folder and they wouldn't appear in the documents folder I viewed in programs). Generally it's not been too big of an issue and I've mostly been able to ignore it, but every once in a while I have to go through and manually 'sync' both folders for simplicity. What's the best way/is there a way to fix this? I have attached a Snip to show which folders I'm talking about

*Longer version with potentially meaningless/potentially meaningful background*

I have always just saved documents to This PC, and avoided OneDrive. I have no particular reason for this one way or the other, the only semi-reason being that I'm not a huge fan of cloud services by reason of privacy and security (even though those aren't REALLY issues from my understanding and I don't have anything potentially damaging on my computer anyway), but I had absolutely no reason to use OneDrive because I never have any reason to access my documents from anywhere but my laptop. Until a couple months ago I just ignored it and saved everything to This PC. However, one day something happened (perhaps an update), and Windows 10 appeared to try to force me to use OneDrive and in doing so it completely screwed with my folders. Folders were emptied, deleted, and moved around, and in a blind rage I disabled OneDrive on my computer. 

*This was months ago so I don't remember exactly what happened or how the folders were messed with, but I know they were and that I had somehow been switched to OneDrive by default. I'm guessing it tried to transfer my files over to OneDrive and failed for some reason, but I really don't have the computer science knowledge to make an actually informed guess*

I fixed my folders, but within a couple of days I noticed something weird. The documents folder under This PC (where I was saving everything) and the documents folder under the pathway This PC > Windows (C:) > Users > [user] are no longer connected/synced/linked together. So many of my programs (especially the licensed ones such as Matlab) access the documents folder through the latter pathway, while everything I saved was in the former (I only noticed this when I continued to save documents to the former folder and they wouldn't appear in the documents folder I viewed in programs). Generally it's not been too big of an issue, but every once in a while I have to go through and manually 'sync' both folders for simplicity. What's the best way/is there a way to fix this?

Answer 1

Then the same fix I linked to in this post:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-files/revert-the-default-documents-folder-to-my-local/98573489-93bd-41b6-9843-9f2db15ae144

will work for you.

Keith

Answer 2

If you right-click the Documents folder under This PC and select the Location tab, what is the folder path?

Keith

Answer 3

It does not appear to have a folder path. I do not see a location tab when I right click (I would include a snip if using the snip tool did not click away from the right-click menu), and the attached snip shows that the "copy path" button at the top (after left-clicking on the documents folder under This PC) is grayed out as if to say there is no path for it to copy

Answer 4

From the right-click menu, you select 'Properties'

It's the Properties dialog that has the Location tab:

Keith

Answer 5

I don't have quite the same thing, but it does claim the This PC documents folder to be in OneDrive.... which doesn't seem right because I thought I had disabled OneDrive (perhaps it was reenabled by an update or I just didn't do it correctly). I can confirm the documents folder under the OneDrive library matches the one under This PC

Is that Location tab perhaps an administrator account privilege? I could have sworn my account had administrative privileges (it's the only account that is signed in or has ever been signed in to my laptop), but perhaps not