Will OneDrive Documents protection break existing file references?

Question

My company recently adopted OneDrive for business and I am getting a bit frustrated with my inability to add existing folders OneDrive for backup/sync, and I can't make the root OneDrive folder an existing folder.

In any case, there is this option to "protect" the Desktop, Pictures, and Documents folders. I did it for Desktop, and I see what happens is it actually moves the Desktop folder to underneath the OneDrive folder, and then I guess does some registry magic to get that new folder's contents to display on the desktop.

I am considering doing the Documents protection, but there are a lot of configuration files in there, and my question is if it will also move all those files and break existing references to them. For example, my SlickEdit config is in there, some Autohotkey config is in there, Lotus Notes config, etc. Will doing this Documents protection break all those file references? Or will Windows work some magic to make the old paths still usable?

Answer 1

Yes, it will break existing file references that do not use the correct registry setting to retrieve the location of the Documents folder. You can potentially fix this with a symbolic link.

From what I can tell from my own experimenting, OneDrive moves all of your files into a subfolder inside the OneDrive folder and updates the registry:

It even updates the locale setting to that of OneDrive. I'm running Windows 10 Professional in the English (United States) locale. As you can see form the screenshot, OneDrive has updated the "Pictures" folder to the Japanese name for the folder ("画像") because I work for a Japanese company.

OneDrive also keeps the original folder in place and simply moves the files out of it into the new folder.

This means that if you have a shortcut to a file in your Documents folder, this shortcut will break once you use OneDrive's Protection feature. This will also cause issues with any batch files or programs that assume that your Documents folder is a subfolder of the %USERPROFILE% folder.

Any application that uses the correct registry setting to retrieve the Documents folder's location, should still function normally.