OneDrive Now Requiring NTFS formatted drives - Users Angry

OneDrive users are battling the fact that they are no longer able to use their OneDrive shares. A recent change requires OneDrive locations to be using the NTFS filesystem.

“Your OneDrive folder can’t be created in the location you selected”, is displayed when users link OneDrive with a location that has a different filesystem than NTFS.

“The location you were trying to create OneDrive folder belongs to a drive with an unsupported file system. To have OneDrive use a different location, click “Set up OneDrive” and point OneDrive to a NTFS drive. To use the existing location with OneDrive, you need to format it with NTFS and then click “Set up OneDrive” to configure your account.”

The Microsoft support forums are flooding with angry users who are complaining. Many have been using the service with an SD cards or external HDDs , mostly formatted at the FAT32 file system. Also ReFS (that better protects against data loss) formatted drives can no longer OneDrive reports myce. I do not think that people mind an NTSF requirement overall, it's just that Microsoft made the changes without any announcement, which is typical Microsoft of course. Microsoft also hasn’t explained why it has made the change.

Users affected by the issue can use a workaround, but that isn’t without risk. Microsoft explains on its website here, how users can convert a FAT32 disk to NTFS. The method is a simple as issuing the command ‘convert drive_letter: /fs:ntfs’ on the command line.

Once a disk is converted, it’s not possible to switch back to FAT32 though.