Windows 10: Duplicate Desktop Folder in Pictures Folder and OneDrive - which, when deleted, wipes out...

I have duplicate Desktop folders in Pictures folder and OneDrive folder which also contains duplicates of other major folders, even though I switched off OneDrive sync. The type is shown as File folder, so it is definitely not a shortcut. I am sure the Desktop folder occupies thrice or more times its actual space due to this. But when I delete one of these, the whole Desktop is emptied.

Is there any way I can get rid of these extraneous folders without harming the contents of my Desktop ? ..because large sized folders cannot be recovered once deleted.

Please help me resolve this safely.

:)

 

Trouble deleting a folder

Thanks for the suggestion but it says "delete folder failed for E:\....." for each folder I try.

*Confused

Will I be forever stuck with these unnecessary folders? *Oh Well hwell:

 

OneDrive resulted in duplicate Documents folders, can't merge

I did try restore but it wouldn't let me. The result was the same, that being that it complained of there already being a system folder there (i.e., users\Chris\Documents, etc.)

I just looked in HKCU... as suggested and found the folders defined as "C:\Users\Chris\OneDrive\...". Interestingly, I found a couple of GUIDs other than the Download folder you referred to above. Both point to "%UserProfile%\OneDrive\...". They duplicate
the explicitly named Personal and Pictures folders assigned to "C:\Users\Chris\OneDrive\...", i.e., they point to the same folder.

Only Personal, Pictures and Desktop are assigned using the C:\Users\Chris\OneDrive string. As above, Personal and Pictures are duplicated as GUIDs. Desktop is not duplicated.

Can I just delete the GUID duplicates of Personal and Pictures (not Downloads) and change the OneDrive entries to "%UserProfile%\...," as some others are assigned?

Is it atypical that Cache is defined as "C:\Users\Chris\AppData\...", unlike other AppData folders defined using "%UserProfile%\..."?

Edit: if editing HKCU directly results in the duplicate folders remaining, that's fine. I can just move the contents of the unwanted folders into the corresponding defined system folder, then delete the duplicate folders.

 

onedrive duplicating my folders...

Hi.

Again, onedrive is going crazy and is duplicating my main folder, full of subfolders. It's locking me out of all my files. I have windows 10, Office 365 home. I paused synch at the moment before I have 1000 copy of my folder, which I can't open anyway!
Please don't ask me any question that will further delay the repair. Simply give me a step by step solution and then improve onedrive so this won't happen again to so many of us. I suggest you also add "onedrive" in the list of "Windows Topics" below since
thousands of users have issues with it.

Thanks

Michel

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