Windows 10 network shortcut taking up space on C drive

Need to see the whole folder tree to understand what you are trying to show, all the way back to C:\

I don't see any Network Shortcuts, just a folder called Network Shortcuts with another folder under it called Jimbob H. What is in there?

Let me see it from File Explorer. It doesn't look like a shortcut to me, at least not in TreeView.

I don't think TreeeView shows Shortcuts.

slickochet said:

I set up network shortcuts on my file server a while ago but have tried to remove them in favour of a network drive as it seems to be taking up space on my C drive.

The 'network shortcut' in the title of your post is a little misleading. You haven't created shortcuts, what you have actually set up is 'Offline files'. When you enable offline files in the Sync Centre then the folder Network Shortcuts is created in Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows to hold the offline copies of the files from the shares on your server that you have chosen to make available offline. This will obviously take up space on your PC as these are sync copies of the original files.


To remove them all from your PC, simply disable offline files. After disabling offline files the Network Shortcuts folder will still exist, but the sync file copies will have been deleted. You can if you wish then delete the Network Shortcuts folder.

Enable or Disable Offline Files in Windows

If you actually want to make the files available offline, then you can reduce the space needed on your PC for the sync copies by only syncing just the folder(s) you need. You can choose to sync just one folder from the share as I have done here. The green 'sync' icon on the folder shows which one will be available offline.



If you decide to continue using offline files, then you can set limits on the space it can use on your PC.

Change Offline Files Disk Usage Limits in Windows

But I've never gone anywhere near offline files. And sync centre says they are not enabled:



This was set up from add network location in my computer originally. I did have a second network shortcut to another drive on the same remote computer. It was not taking up space on my local drive and I was able to remove it without deleting anything on the networked machine.