How to Fix OneDrive Duplicate Folders

If you are using Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud service to save folders, images and videos on a safe location then you will definitely be aware of the fact that there is only a limited amount of online storage capacity available so you have to be extremely efficient in how you utilize this space.

This probably means you should keep only highly important and frequently required folders in OneDrive storage. And you should also make sure that there are no duplicate folders so as to avoid any wastage of your precious cloud storage allocation. Apart from manual methods to delete dupe folders from the cloud, you can choose an automated software utility that can perform this task in relatively less time and do it more efficiently. For instance, using Clone Files Checker (CFC) for scanning Onedrive can help you identify the duplicate files easily. 

 

Many users complain about the duplicate folders that are created automatically on the cloud and their computer’s name is appended to the folder’s name. This problem is actually not associated with OneDrive only, and it can be found on every single cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive. The actual reason behind this spawning of duplicate folders is the user updating the concerning folder from different locations. If you update a single folder from multiple locations, all of them will be saved as separate copies which can be distinguished by their names. This is at least helpful in the case when you want to retain the correct version and get rid of all duplicate folders from OneDrive.

How to Find Duplicate Folders on OneDrive

The best way is to keep track of your folders on a more frequent basis so that a mess won’t form in the cloud. If you happen to update a folder from a computer or a mobile device which isn’t connected to the Internet, you will definitely update the same folder from another device later on. In such an event, you must check whether a duplicate folder has been created. But if you can’t do a daily check and have gathered a lot of duplicate folders then you need to find each folder and delete it manually. Here is how you can go about this task.

  1. Open File Explorer and navigate to the folder that is synced with OneDrive.
  2. Enter the keyword which you find to be appended to the folder’s original name, in the Search Bar.
  3. Once the search is over, it will show you all the returned Search Results.
  4. You can even search for different keywords if you believe you have updated the folder from multiple computers to find all the duplicate folders.

Deleting Duplicate Folders on OneDrive

Once you have searched for all the duplicate folders then you need to analyze these folders. Don’t just straightaway delete them without checking their contents. There is a possibility that a folder with another computer’s name appended to it depicts the latest version and the one which you think of as genuine is an outdated version. Do this for all the folders precisely. Once you are absolutely sure that you have found the culprit(s), get rid of them by pressing Shift + Delete keys on your keyboard.