Decide WHERE you want your personal folders to be located, either in the default location of C:\users\yourusername OR on a secondary drive.
PERFORM STEPS A & B
STEP A- Though it may not be necessary, I consider it prudent to copy those folders that are defaulting to Onedrive to an external flash drive just to be on the safe side. (Once I either messed up or the process did not go as planned and I lost the files within the desktop folder so I now play it safe).
STEP B- Unlink PC from Onedrive. In task tray, click Onedrive icon. Click gear icon to get into Onedrive Settings. Under Account tab, select "Unlink this PC"
under Settings tab - Uncheck start Onedrive automatically with Windows.
CHOOSE OPTION 1 OR 2 DEPENDING WHERE YOU WANT YOUR PERSONAL FOLDERS LOCATED
OPTION 1- LOCATE USER FILES IN THE DEFAULT LOCATION OF C:\USERS\YOURUSERNAME
Use this tutorial.
Move or Restore Default Location of Documents Folder in Windows 11 Tutorial
OPTION 2- CHANGE LOCATION OF PERSONAL FOLDERS TO A NEW STORAGE LOCATION SUCH AS A SECONDARY DRIVE
- Open File Explorer.
- Navigate to your storage drive
- Create new folders there named Documents, Desktop, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos
TO MOVE FOLDER LOCATION
In the left file explorer navigation pane,
RIGHT click on 'documents' folder, select
properties. (NOTE: If you don't see the Documents folder in the navigation pane, then type shellersonal into the address bar of File Explorer, and press
Enter to open the Documents folder no matter where it may be located.)
Click
location tab
Click
Move button
Click the
Select Folder button.
In the explorer window that pops up, browse to the secondary drive and select the DOCUMENTS folder you created.
Click
Select Folder, Click
Move. click Ok
You'll see a prompt asking whether you want to move files from the old location to new location. Select YES.
To prove to yourself that it worked, when you now go to properties of the documents folders it should show location as your secondary drive.
Repeat this process for the other 5 folders you want to move to your secondary drive.
Make sure that all the files that were originally in the folders that defaulted to Onedrive are there in the new location. If not, just copy the files from the folders you backed up from step A.