Solved OneDrive unlink paranoia

pseymour · Nov 25, 2024

To add to what @andrew129260 said about the icons, here’s a guide to what the OneDrive icons mean.

What do the OneDrive icons mean? - Microsoft Support

support.microsoft.com

TraderGary · Nov 25, 2024

andrew129260 said:
Yeah I saw his video on it before. It was well done. But again, the onedrive backup is being turned on automatically for most people. Either by upgrading to windows 11, or installing windows 11. I have seen feature updates turn it on automatically. I would rather just not deal with the hassle, and uninstall it and use something else. Like google drive. Or just manually upload files to the website which is pretty quick. I understand how it can be useful for some people. But I don't want it. Microsoft has time and time again chosen to not respect my settings, so I don't want to use onedrive because It might change its mind again on its own. I am sure some people out there it works perfectly fine and respects your settings, but not everyone has had that experience. My system image and installer has onedrive removed and for good reason.

This move was not well thought out at all. I support a lot of friends and family members, and straightening out this mess has been a nightmare. Personally, I had no trouble with their "backup feature", as I immediately turned it OFF. OneDrive is NOT a backup. OneDrive does only one thing and does it flawlessly. It keeps everything I put in my OneDrive folder in real-time sync in all my computers and devices. For me that's been invaluable for over 16 years. Obviously, YMMV.

andrew129260 · Nov 25, 2024

TraderGary said:
This move was not well thought out at all. I support a lot of friends and family members, and straightening out this mess has been a nightmare. Personally, I had no trouble with their "backup feature", as I immediately turned it OFF. OneDrive is NOT a backup. OneDrive does only one thing and does it flawlessly. It keeps everything I put in my OneDrive folder in real-time sync in all my computers and devices. For me that's been invaluable for over 16 years. Obviously, YMMV.

Yeah If I wanted to pay microsoft for storage and had a use for the whole 365 thing I totally understand. For someone like you it's a no brainer.

For someone like me, it's a waste of money, and I don't want to fiddle with it. I already had google drive, and it worked great. And they allow me to just simply checkbox what I want backed up. I don't have to worry about settings changing or anything. And if I make changes to a file its instantly uploaded just like onedrive. For me it's onedrive without the hassle. And it works for me.

This will seem like I am lying but I swear it just happened 30 minutes ago. Just had a photog at work somehow get onedrive on his machine even though we removed it before giving it to them and have group policy set to not allow it, but somehow it got installed and it signed in automatically and started backing up over 200GB of video files bringing his machine to a crawl and preventing videos from being edited. I will need to research how this happened because I cannot be dealing with this crap. Its either my overlords who dont have the right policys set, or my screw up. Time to find out which.

Update: It was the user & me. I don't know how, but they apparently can install onedrive through a prompt from microsoft without admin rights.........FUN

ChrisPbass · Nov 25, 2024

Dru2 said:
Great job of explaining things here Gary. And one I'll bookmark for future reference in pointing those with questions to (or making false claims).

If you are 'using' onedrive without connecting to the online backup and are ignorant that 'documents' is really c:user/onedrive/documents and you delete onedrive, ALL your local documents are gone. Ask me how I know!
There will always be detractors and always people that 'it's great! and always works perfectly! i don't know what your problem is!'

I belong to the I want to Know Exactly Where my Docs Are camp. The 'OneDrive does not exist in ANY form on MY PC because I don't want it on MY PC.'
1. maybe I'm dumb and don't know how to use it and may accidentally delete 30gigs of pictures. So get rid of it.
2. I have other systems in place and don't need it and since its MINE and I don't want it, it should not be there.

I have 2 custom folders 1) local.docs 2)local.pics. I do not touch 'documents' (user/onedrive/docs) but Windows always wants to go there. That annoys me.

It's just stupid that a local folder is somehow associated with an online back up and nuking the backup gets rid of all those files. Ask me how I know!

Many of you know a ton more about PCs than me but I'm not stupid, I was just ignorant of what I was doing. Long story short (too long) I just wanted to get rid of OneDrive. I didn't know the association and therefore lost 30gigs of stuff. Again...not that big of a deal...it did suck for a few days.

I should probably unsubscribe from this thread

pparks1 · Nov 25, 2024

ChrisPbass said:
It's just stupid that a local folder is somehow associated with an online back up and nuking the backup gets rid of all those files. Ask me how I know!

The files are still in the cloud, in your onedrive account. Anything you created on your PC and placed in my mydocuments prior to the move, would still 100% exist in the cloud, in Onedrive. In fact, when you shut off the backup option, it puts a shortcut right into the folder to take you to your files in the cloud.

Even if you deleted the files from your local machine from that folder, prior to turning off OneDrive and then permanently deleted your deleted items on your desktop, they would get replicated to the cloud as deleted, but would still be in the cloud recycling bin. They didn't get deleted, you would be able to quickly restore them from there.

TraderGary · Nov 25, 2024

pparks1 said:
The files are still in the cloud, in your onedrive account. Anything you created on your PC and placed in my mydocuments prior to the move, would still 100% exist in the cloud, in Onedrive. In fact, when you shut off the backup option, it puts a shortcut right into the folder to take you to your files in the cloud.

Even if you deleted the files from your local machine from that folder, prior to turning off OneDrive and then permanently deleted your deleted items on your desktop, they would get replicated to the cloud as deleted, but would still be in the cloud recycling bin. They didn't get deleted, you would be able to quickly restore them from there.

The only caveat is that the OneDrive Recycle Bin only keeps files for 30 days. You must restore before 30 days elapse from the time they were deleted.

pparks1 · Nov 25, 2024

TraderGary said:
The only caveat is that the OneDrive Recycle Bin only keeps files for 30 days. You must restore before 30 days elapse from the time they were deleted.

Correct, but I assumed that if you deleted My Documents, it would be noticed almost immediately...so I didn't mention the 30 days retention policy.

pseymour · Nov 25, 2024

andrew129260 said:
Update: It was the user & me. I don't know how, but they apparently can install onedrive through a prompt from microsoft without admin rights.........FUN

You can run OneDrive setup with the /allusers switch to install it in Program Files. If you don't use the switch, it installs in the user's profile directory, no special rights required. Neato, huh?

andrew129260 · Nov 25, 2024

pseymour said:
You can run OneDrive setup with the /allusers switch to install it in Program Files. If you don't use the switch, it installs in the user's profile directory, no special rights required. Neato, huh?

Just like the browsers that install to the user folder when they dont have admin rights.......sigh*

Dru2 · Nov 25, 2024

ChrisPbass said:
If you are 'using' onedrive without connecting to the online backup and are ignorant that 'documents' is really c:user/onedrive/documents and you delete onedrive, ALL your local documents are gone. Ask me how I know!
There will always be detractors and always people that 'it's great! and always works perfectly! i don't know what your problem is!'

I belong to the I want to Know Exactly Where my Docs Are camp. The 'OneDrive does not exist in ANY form on MY PC because I don't want it on MY PC.'
1. maybe I'm dumb and don't know how to use it and may accidentally delete 30gigs of pictures. So get rid of it.
2. I have other systems in place and don't need it and since its MINE and I don't want it, it should not be there.

I have 2 custom folders 1) local.docs 2)local.pics. I do not touch 'documents' (user/onedrive/docs) but Windows always wants to go there. That annoys me.

It's just stupid that a local folder is somehow associated with an online back up and nuking the backup gets rid of all those files. Ask me how I know!

Many of you know a ton more about PCs than me but I'm not stupid, I was just ignorant of what I was doing. Long story short (too long) I just wanted to get rid of OneDrive. I didn't know the association and therefore lost 30gigs of stuff. Again...not that big of a deal...it did suck for a few days.

I should probably unsubscribe from this thread

WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???

And why quote my post when it was in response to @TraderGary's post, in which I fully agree with. If you have an issue with that and don't like what we're saying, then yeah.... you probably should unsubscribe from this thread.

Peace

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