What do Red Minus signs mean on my desktop icons?

Question

Not a major issue, but not long ago my desktop icons were tagged with little red minus signs (technically white minus sign, red background). Here's a picture:

I tried clicking on the folders & they opened like normal. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary in the file details. The issue resolved itself when I rebooted.

Solution

This is caused by OneDrive.
Newer Windows 10 versions at some point auto-activated OneDrive for every user that logged in to Windows with a Microsoft-account.
On top of that OneDrive automatically setup the Documents and Desktop folders of that user to Synchronize to OneDrive.

Now: When you login to Windows and OneDrive has problems connecting to the OneDrive servers on the Internet it will show that Minus icon to indicate the file/folder couldn't be synced. You will see a green check-mark icon if the sync is succesfull.

Comments

[DavidPostill]

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