Cloud services sharing not working in Virtual Machine.

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Symptoms

I do not see the Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive shares in my Windows Virtual Machine.

The option labeled "Share cloud folders with Windows" does show as checked in my virtual machine's configuration. I have even tried disabling it and restarting, re-enabling it and restarting. It didn't make a difference.

Cause

Virtual Machine misconfiguration.

Resolution

Reinstall Parallels Tools: with a virtual machine running, click ActionsReinstall Parallels Tools in the top menu. For more information refer to this article.

Note: when using Microsoft's OneDrive and other cloud-based applications in on the Mac side, you may see only some files being accessible from the Windows side. That is because such apps utilize on-demand file access. That means that instead of storing the files on your Mac, they rather display a kind of shortcuts, and only when the file is being accessed by user, the application downloads the file to Mac, and as a result, it can be shared to Windows.

The below example is for OneDrive settings to be checked and changed to disable on-demand files access settings. All other apps also have similar settings disabling which will allow accessing all files.

In order to have access to all files, the on-demand access feature needs to be disabled:

  1. On your Mac, click on the OneDrive icon > MorePreferences Preferences and click Turn Off Files On-Demand.
  2. It may take some time before all OneDrive files will be accessible on the Windows side.
  3. Alternatively, you can use the OneDrive for Windows inside the virtual machine.

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