Where Are Favorites in Windows ?

In Windows 11, your favorites live inside File Explorer's Home view, under a section literally labeled Favorites — but that label only covers individual files you have pinned. Folders you pin show up one section above it, under a different label: Quick access. In Windows 10, there is no separate Favorites label at all — everything you pin, files and folders alike, lands together under Quick Access, the same panel that greets you every time you open File Explorer. Same underlying feature, split into two names on two versions of the same operating system, and almost nobody explains why.

Jake's shop sees this one weekly, usually attached to a bigger complaint. A customer drops off a laptop for a RAM upgrade, Jake reinstalls the same handful of apps, hands it back, and gets a call an hour later: "Where did my favorites go?" He used to lose twenty minutes per call walking someone through the wrong settings screen before landing on the right answer, and a twenty-minute phone call on a busy Saturday is a walk-in customer he didn't get to help in person instead.

Multiply that across a shop that takes a dozen calls like it a month and the cost stops being trivial — it's an hour or more of paid staff time spent on something that, once you know exactly where to look, takes under thirty seconds to fix. That gap between "thirty seconds once you know" and "twenty minutes when you don't" is the whole reason this page exists.

The one question that decides everything else

Before you go looking, answer this: are you missing files and folders you pinned inside File Explorer — the window with the little folder icon that opens whenever you double-click "This PC," a drive, or any folder on your desktop — or are you missing a row of website bookmarks sitting under your browser's address bar? Both are called "Favorites." Both are things people notice missing right after a reinstall or a new PC. And they live in completely unrelated places, controlled by completely different pieces of software.

This guide covers the File Explorer kind — the one behind the question people actually type most often, "where are my favorites in Windows 10." If you meant your browser's bookmarks bar, skip ahead and we'll sort that mix-up out too, because it trips up more people than you'd expect.

One more piece of jargon worth nailing down before we go further: a "shortcut" or a "pin" is never a copy of the actual file or folder. It's a small pointer that tells Windows where the real thing lives, so opening a pinned item opens the original, and deleting a pin never deletes what it points to. That distinction matters for almost everything below.

Which of these is actually happening to you?

Where Favorites live in Windows 11

Open File Explorer (Win + E) and you land on a view called Home, not Quick Access — that's the first surprise for anyone coming over from Windows 10. Inside Home, Microsoft splits your pinned items by type instead of lumping everything into one list the way Windows 10 does:

• Quick access — the folders you've pinned
• Favorites — the individual files you've pinned
• Recent — files you've opened lately, whether pinned or not

So if you're staring at Home thinking "I don't see a Favorites section," check whether what you're actually missing is a folder rather than a file. Folders never show up under Favorites in Windows 11 — they belong to Quick access, even though both sections sit on the same Home screen and both got there the same way: you right-clicked something and chose "Pin."

The right-click trap that catches upgraders

Here's where a lot of people give up before they even find the option. In Windows 11, right-clicking a file or folder shows a shortened context menu — just a row of icons across the top for the common actions like copy, cut, rename, and delete, with a text list of a few other actions below it. "Pin to Quick access" and "Pin to Favorites" aren't on that shortened menu at all. They're hidden inside an item called Show more options, which you can also open instantly with Shift + F10 instead of hunting for it with the mouse. Clicking it swaps in the full, classic right-click menu — the same one Windows 10 shows by default — and the pin options are right there in it.

This single missing menu item is probably the biggest source of "pinning just doesn't work on Windows 11" complaints, and it isn't a bug. Microsoft shortened that menu deliberately to reduce clutter; pinning didn't go away, it just moved one click deeper.

Where Favorites live in Windows 10

Windows 10 doesn't bother splitting anything. Open File Explorer and you land straight on Quick Access, which shows your frequently used folders near the top and your recently opened files below them. Anything you've pinned — file or folder, it doesn't matter — stays fixed at the very top of that list, ahead of anything Windows added there on its own.

To pin something, right-click it and choose Pin to Quick access. There's no shortened menu to fight through the way there is on Windows 11 — the full right-click menu is there by default, every time, on every version of Windows 10 currently in use.

One honest note if you're still on Windows 10: Windows 10 reached its end of support on October 14, 2025. It still boots normally, still opens File Explorer exactly as described above, and Quick Access still works exactly the same way it always has — none of that changed. What did change is that a Windows 10 machine no longer receives free security updates unless it's enrolled in Extended Security Updates. Consumer ESU enrollment happens from Settings > Windows Update, requires being on the 22H2 update and signed in with a Microsoft account rather than a local one, and covers up to ten devices per account. It's free if you turn on Windows Backup to sync your settings, redeemable for 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or available as a roughly $30 one-time purchase, and Microsoft extended the program in June 2026 so enrolled devices are now covered into October 2027 rather than stopping a year after end of support. None of that is required to keep using Quick Access — it's just worth mentioning to a customer while you already have their machine open.

The old Links folder — still there, rarely the fix

Buried in every Windows 10 and 11 user profile — the folder of personal settings and files tied to whichever account you're signed in as, kept separate from every other account on the same PC — is a folder at:

C:\Users\yourusername\Links

This is a leftover from the pre-Quick-Access days, when File Explorer's sidebar had an actual folder called "Favorites" and its contents lived here as a set of shortcut files — small pointer files, not the real files themselves, that just tell Windows where the original is stored. If you open this Links folder today, you may find old shortcuts sitting untouched from years back, pinned before Quick Access existed and never cleaned up since.

If you spot something you want back, right-click it and pin it the normal way: to Quick access on Windows 10, or to Quick access or Favorites depending on whether it's a folder or a file on Windows 11. That's the whole fix. The Links folder itself doesn't drive what shows in the Home or Quick Access panel anymore, so don't expect adding or removing files inside it to change anything you see there.

Getting a missing item back, step by step

If the file or folder still exists on the drive

Navigate to wherever it actually lives now, right-click it, and pin it again. On Windows 11, remember to click Show more options first if you don't immediately see a pin option in the short menu. This covers the overwhelming majority of "my favorites disappeared" calls Jake gets — the item itself is fine, only the pin was lost, usually because of a reinstall, a profile reset, or the customer being handed a brand-new account instead of their old one.

If you're not sure where it went

Use File Explorer's search box in the top-right corner, and search from "This PC" rather than from inside a single folder, so the search isn't limited to somewhere the item no longer is. If it turns up, you can pin it straight from the search results — you don't need to open its actual folder first.

A quick next step worth doing at the same time

While you're re-pinning one thing, it's a good moment to also pin the folders a customer will reach for constantly — Desktop, Downloads, and Documents are the three almost everyone wants one click away. Pinning all three takes under thirty seconds and heads off the next "where did it go" call before it happens.

File Explorer Favorites vs. your browser's favorites bar

This mix-up is common enough that it earns its own section rather than a one-line disclaimer. Your browser's favorites bar — the row of website shortcuts sitting under the address bar in Edge, Chrome, or Firefox — is stored inside that browser's own settings, not inside Windows itself and not anywhere near File Explorer. Reinstalling Windows doesn't touch it, unless you also reset or reinstall the browser and then skip signing back in with the account it was syncing to.

Ethan's take is blunt on this one: "People call about a browser problem constantly thinking it's a Windows problem, and it's not their fault — both features share the exact same word. If your bookmarks vanished right after you signed into Edge or Chrome with a Microsoft or Google account, that's almost always a sync setting inside the browser, and nothing covered on this page is going to fix it." If that's your situation, the fix is in the browser's own settings menu and sign-in status, not in File Explorer.

Jake keeps a mental shortcut for telling the two apart on a call: if the missing bar sits at the very top of a browser window, right under the tabs, it's the browser's. If it's a panel inside a window titled "File Explorer" with a folder icon, it's the one this guide is about. That one distinction resolves most of these calls before he even asks a second question.

When pinning doesn't stick — what each symptom means

Most of the time, pinning something and finding it still there tomorrow is the end of the story. When it isn't, the symptom itself is usually enough to tell you which of a small number of things is going on — you rarely need to guess.

You pin it, it appears, and it's gone the next time you open File Explorer

Try pinning it again once, cleanly, and check whether it holds after a full restart rather than just closing and reopening the File Explorer window. If it still won't hold, treat it as a fallback situation rather than something to keep fighting: create a shortcut to the item on the desktop instead, so the customer has one-click access while the underlying issue gets sorted out separately.

You don't see "Show more options" at all

You're not actually on Windows 11 — that shortened menu is an 11-only change, so its absence is itself a useful clue. If you're seeing the full classic right-click menu immediately with no extra click needed, you're either on Windows 10 already, or on a Windows 11 machine running a shell customization tool that restores the old menu (more on that below). Either way, the Windows 10 instructions in this guide apply to you as written.

The whole Quick Access or Home panel is just empty

This is normal right after a brand-new install or a fresh user account — there's nothing to show because nothing has been pinned or opened yet under that particular account. It isn't broken, it's new. Pin a couple of folders you use daily and the panel fills in immediately.

A pinned item shows up but won't open, or shows an error when clicked

This means the folder or file has been deleted, renamed, or moved since it was pinned — the pin itself is only a pointer, so it doesn't update automatically when the thing it points to changes. Unpin it and, if the item still exists somewhere else, pin it fresh from its new location.

Windows 11 vs. Windows 10, side by side

The practical upgrade trap sits in that last row. Someone used to pinning things on Windows 10 for years, then handed a new Windows 11 machine, will right-click, not see the option they're used to, and conclude the feature is gone. It isn't — it's one click further in, behind "Show more options."

Do you need a third-party tool for this?

Honestly, no — and Ethan is firm about this one. "This is one of the rare cases where the built-in tool is genuinely enough. People reach for a third-party file manager because Quick Access feels basic, and then they're stuck learning a whole new program just to do something Explorer already does for free." Shell-customization utilities that restore an older right-click menu as the default on Windows 11 exist, and they do remove the extra "Show more options" click. But that's the entire benefit on offer here — they don't add a single new pinning capability, they just skip a step Microsoft added.

The one case where it's worth considering an alternative file manager is a genuinely different workflow need — someone managing thousands of files across many drives who wants tabbed browsing or dual-pane views. That's a real reason to look elsewhere. "I can't find my favorites" on its own is not.

There's a cost to switching that's easy to underweight in the moment: a new file manager means new keyboard habits, a new place to look for the pin option, and a new program to keep updated on every machine it's installed on. For a problem that's fully solved by clicking "Show more options" once, that trade rarely pays for itself. Jake's rule of thumb for the shop is simple: if a customer's complaint is specifically about finding pinned files or folders, fix it inside File Explorer and move on. Save the conversation about alternative file managers for customers who bring up a workflow problem File Explorer genuinely can't handle, and let them decide whether that trade is worth it for their own machine.

Why bother pinning instead of just using desktop shortcuts?

Jake asked Ethan this one directly once, half-joking that a cluttered desktop full of shortcuts does the same job. Ethan didn't let it slide. "It doesn't, not really. A desktop shortcut lives in exactly one spot — you have to be looking at the desktop to use it. Quick Access and Favorites live inside File Explorer itself, which means they're one click away no matter which folder you're already sitting in. You don't have to minimize everything and go hunting on the desktop first."

There's also a tidiness argument, and Ethan makes it without apology: a desktop covered in shortcut icons is slower to scan than a short pinned list, and it's the first thing a customer notices when Jake hands a laptop back. A clean desktop with three or four pinned folders in File Explorer looks like someone set the machine up properly. A desktop with forty icons looks like nobody did.

None of that means desktop shortcuts are wrong — they're genuinely useful for the one or two things you open constantly and want visible the instant you unlock the PC. The two aren't in competition. Pin the folders and files you reach for while you're already working inside File Explorer; keep desktop shortcuts for the handful of things you want in view before you've opened anything at all.

If you're setting up a shared or shop machine

Jake unpins everything from Quick Access on every trade-in laptop before it goes back out the door, because a previous owner's pinned folders otherwise stay sitting there for the next person to see the moment they open File Explorer. There's no bulk "clear everything" switch for this — each item gets right-clicked and unpinned one at a time, the same action used to remove any single pin. It's slower than he'd like, but it's the only reliable way to be sure nothing personal is still showing when the next owner signs in.

Setting up the same folders on every PC you configure

If you're a small shop like Jake's and you pin the same handful of folders on every machine you configure, doing it by hand each time adds up over a busy month. Pinning is a right-click action, not a setting buried in a menu somewhere, and there's no supported command-line option or Settings toggle to script it — the realistic approach is to make it the very last item on a standard setup checklist rather than trying to skip it. Five folders pinned by hand, right after the software install finishes, takes under a minute and is one less thing that gets forgotten on a rushed handover.

Ethan's advice here is to resist the urge to over-engineer it. "I've watched people spend twenty minutes trying to find a clever workaround for something that's a ten-second manual task. If you're only doing it on a handful of machines a week, the checklist beats the workaround every time." Where it genuinely stops being worth doing by hand is a shop imaging dozens of identical machines a week for a business client — at that scale it's worth asking whether the client wants a standard folder layout baked into the image itself, rather than repeating the same five clicks on every unit.

That covers the setup side. The rest of this page is the fast-reference list — the exact questions people type into a search box once they've already read the sections above and just want a one-line confirmation.

Frequently asked questions

Where are my favorites in Windows 10?

Under Quick Access, which is also the page File Explorer opens to by default. Right-click any file or folder and choose "Pin to Quick access" to add it there.

Where is the Favorites bar in Windows 11?

It's a section inside File Explorer's Home view, holding pinned files specifically. Pinned folders sit above it under Quick access instead.

Why does my right-click menu not show a Pin option?

On Windows 11, click "Show more options" (or press Shift+F10) to open the full classic menu, which includes the pin options.

What is the C:\Users\yourusername\Links folder?

A leftover location from the older, pre-Quick-Access Favorites feature. It can still hold old shortcuts, but it no longer controls what appears in today's Quick Access or Home panel.

Did Windows 10 ever have a Favorites section separate from Quick Access?

Not in the version most people are running today — Quick Access has always been the single combined list on Windows 10.

My favorites bar is missing in my browser, not File Explorer — is that covered here?

No. That's a browser feature stored inside the browser itself, unrelated to File Explorer. Check the browser's own settings and sign-in state instead.

How do I unpin something from Quick Access or Favorites?

Right-click the pinned item wherever it appears in the panel and choose Unpin. This does not delete the actual file or folder, only the shortcut to it.

I reset my PC and lost all my pins. Can I get them back?

Not automatically — pins aren't backed up separately from your files. You'll need to re-pin the folders and files you want, one at a time, from wherever they're stored on the drive.

Does deleting files from the Links folder unpin anything?

No. The two aren't connected. Unpin directly from the Quick Access or Favorites panel instead.

Why does Windows 11 separate files and folders into two sections?

Microsoft split the old combined Quick Access list into Quick access for folders and Favorites for files as part of the Home view redesign.

Why does a pinned item show an error when I click it?

The file or folder has been deleted, renamed, or moved since it was pinned. The pin is just a pointer, so it doesn't update on its own. Unpin it and re-pin from the new location if the item still exists.

Do pinned items sync between my devices?

No. Quick Access and Favorites are stored locally per device and per user profile; they don't travel with your Microsoft account to a different PC.

Is there a keyboard shortcut to pin the current folder?

Not a dedicated one. Use Shift+F10 to open the full right-click menu on Windows 11, then select the pin option from there.

Why do folders I pinned appear before folders Windows added on its own?

Pinned items are always sorted ahead of the automatically suggested frequent and recent entries, so your own choices stay at the top of the list.

Should I still worry about Windows 10 end of support if Quick Access works fine?

Quick Access itself isn't affected either way, but the underlying operating system stopped receiving free security updates on October 14, 2025. That's a separate decision from anything covered in this guide, worth thinking about on its own timeline rather than as part of a favorites problem.

Is pinning to Quick Access or Favorites the same as pinning to the taskbar or Start menu?

No. Those are separate pinning systems that happen to share the word "pin." Taskbar and Start pins launch apps; Quick Access and Favorites pins open specific files and folders inside File Explorer. Pinning something in one place has no effect on the other.

Do I need to be signed in with a Microsoft account for pinning to work?

No. Pinning to Quick Access or Favorites works the same on a local account as it does on a Microsoft account, since it's a File Explorer feature tied to the Windows user profile, not to any online sign-in.

Is there a limit to how many folders or files I can pin?

The original post and Microsoft's own documentation don't specify a hard cap, and in practice most people pin far fewer items than would ever test one. If your list is getting long enough to feel cluttered, that's a sign to unpin the items you no longer use rather than a sign you're approaching a limit.

Will pinning a folder slow down File Explorer?

No. A pin is just a shortcut sitting in a list — it doesn't scan, index, or monitor the folder in the background, so having several items pinned has no meaningful effect on how fast File Explorer opens or runs.

Revision note. Originally published December 17, 2016. Rewritten August 16, 2026 for Windows 11 and Windows 10. Back then, "Quick Access" was the newer replacement for File Explorer's older Favorites shortcuts, and the Links folder was worth checking directly. Since then Windows 11 has gone a step further and split pinned files into their own Favorites section while Windows 10 kept the single combined panel it always had. If you're still hunting for a folder that used to just be there, we know how disorienting that feels — hopefully this saves you the twenty minutes it used to cost.