Your IT administrator has set a policy that prevents changes to known folders. Please remove this policy and try again.

So I recently stumbled upon this particular issue when I decided to start utilizing OneDrive for Business within our Office 365 subscription to redirect known folders (Documents, Desktop, Pictures) to OneDrive. One of the first articles I read mentioned that if you previously had folder redirection setup in Group policy then you wouldn’t be able to utilize the Silently move Windows known folders to OneDrive or Prompt users to move Windows known folders to OneDrive settings.

I thought that it would be enough to just remove the old folder redirection policy at first but then realized that it would keep all the folders redirected after removing the policy. So what I tried then was to set all the folder redirection back to the local user profile location and then updated the group policy using gpupdate /force and when I tried to Manage backups I was greeted by this wonderful error message:

‘ Your IT administrator has set a policy that prevents changes to known folders. Please remove this policy and try again. ‘

Want to know how I fixed it, check out the process below.

So here’s the process, I hope it helps someone.

1. Launch Group Policy Management on one of your domain controllers and find the policy that defines your current folder redirection settings. Right click on the policy and click on Edit
2. Go to User Configuration -> Policies -> Windows Settings -> Folder Redirection
3. Right-Click on each of the folders and click properties
4. In the Target Tab, make sure Setting is set to Basic – Redirect everyone’s folder to the same location
5. Under Target folder location make sure its set to Redirect to the local userprofile location
6. Under the Settings tab, make sure that Redirect the folder back to the local user profile location when policy is removed. is selected.
7. Click Ok

   At this point, you’ll want to go to the computer that is having the issue (in my case all of them) and open a command prompt to issue the gpupdate /force command. You’ll most likely be requested to log off and back on, go ahead and do that.

8. Back in Group Policy Management, remove the GPO (group policy object) from the OU, you can delete it from the list of Group Policy Objects too if you want, we won’t need it anymore.

   Now you’ll want to open a command prompt and run gpupdate /force just one more time. If you are asked to log off and back on, go ahead with that.

9. You should now be able to right-click on OneDrive and click Settings and go to the Backup tab and click on Manage backup. Now the Start protection button should be enabled and all is good.

Hopefully this helps someone.