Move One Drive For Business folder – a workaround

OneDrive is a reasonable place to keep documents at your workplace. The habit of keeping most my documents there saved me twice already. Once, when a company suffered a ransomware attack, we were only able to recover files backed up in OneDrive and other cloud services. And then another time my SSD died and OneDrive again helped me recover everything.

But as I checked last week, OneDrive for Business doesn’t seem to offer any option to move the folder to another location. The default is something like:

c:\Users\MyUserName\OneDrive - Company Name\

But I find it more easily accessible in a path like:

c:\OneDrive

Workaround

Here is a small, creative workaround I am proud of, so allow me to share it 😉

mklink /J "c:\OneDrive" "c:\Users\MyUserName\OneDrive - Company Name\"Code language: Bash (bash)

The command creates a junction point at c:\OneDrive that points to the directory c:\Users\MyUserName\OneDrive - Company Name.

This means that when you access the directory at c:\OneDrive, you are actually accessing the contents of c:\Users\MyUserName\OneDrive - Company Name. Any changes made to the files or folders within c:\OneDrive will be reflected in the original directory as well.

So for clarity, when we do it, there are now two references to the same folder visible in your file system. I found this solution good enough for me, though, and it’s working flawlessly so far.