Why is onedrive not syncing with file explorer on my computer. It will sync to the cloud online. It shows up on another computer.

Question

I saved documents to onedrive but they do not show up in file explorer only online for onedrive. I can actually check and see them syncing. I have reset, unlinked, signed out, etc. as stated in the forums. I can save three documents and specifically select one drive, maybe one doc saves there and the other I can not find or it goes to the PC. I have spent hours resetting and re-linking this account. I did not change my settings for onedrive so I am unsure how this occurred. When I checked the settings before the reset, all documents was checked, however below select were unchecked and it would not allow me to make the change to all.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi Todd. Welcome to the Microsoft Community.

Go to the OneDrive Settings > Sync and Backup > Manage Backup and toggle the sync of your folders to ON.

At OneDrive Settings > Account > Choose folders, select "Make all files available."

Folders with greyed-out checkmarks are pre-checked and cannot be unchecked. They are available on your PC.

Now, your folders should show in File Explorer.

I hope that helps. Feel free to ask for further assistance.

Best Regards,

Craig

Answer 2

I had similar issues. The grey OneDrive logo absent in the info tray (bottom right extreme part of screen) means OneDrive is not functioning. 1) Things got resolved when I uninstalled Onedrive and reinstalled it. It takes sometime to sync up to my laptop. But it is working now. 2) Whenever I encountered the issue again thereafter, I noticed that a yellow box with "Start OneDrive" appears at the top margin of File Explorer whenever I clicked a folder. I need to double click this yellow box, then click Start OneDrive on the small drop down that appears. The words in the yellow box becomes "OneDrive" instead of "Start OneDrive, and all is fine again. Not sure if this will be the same solution for your case.

Answer 3

Hi Craig,

Thank you for your response. I had done that but I was still having issues with file explorer. Today seems to be a bit better after the several resets and unlink/rellinks. For some reason when I save a doc, it wants to save to documents and not onedrive and I have to find it and drag it to onedrive. They used to automatically save to onedrive. Also the syn is much slower. I noticed this weeks ago after an update.

I appreciate you advice.

Answer 4

For example, in Microsoft Word, I go to File > Options > Save > Default local file location and save the file in C:\Users\username\OneDrive\Documents, which is the syncing Documents folder. You need to check the save location settings for the app you are using.

I don't have a Documents folder outside of OneDrive. I back up all files to OneDrive.