Is OneDrive moving all your files? How to regain control of your Windows memory – 3 ways
If you don’t pay careful attention when setting up your new Windows PC, you may find that many of your data files are suddenly moved to the cloud. It could be a good thing, it could also be a mess. And, Of course, Microsoft is frustratingly unhelpful when it comes to explaining how this feature works.
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If this happens to you, follow one simple rule Douglas Adams was coined many years ago: Don’t panic. Before you do anything, it’s important to understand exactly what’s going on.
When you set up a new user account on your Windows PC, Windows creates a standard set of folders for you: Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music, Videos. These “known folders” are stored on your system drive, as part of your user profile (C:\Users\User name), just as they have been in every version of Windows for the past few decades.
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When you sign in with a Microsoft account on Windows 10 or 11, Windows creates an additional folder in your profile, OneDrive, and gives that folder a prominent link in the navigation bar to the left of Files. Explorer. Once setup is complete, your user profile will look something like this:
Here’s what the new user profile looks like in Windows 11. Note the wording in all those standard folders: “Local Stored.”
Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
The label below each of those known folders tells you they are stored locally. All is well and good, right?
Well, until OneDrive decided to get involved.
When you set up a brand new PC, you can easily get past the Out of Box Experience (OOBE) screen to use this feature, which encourages you to click the “Back Up Now” button, as shown. market here.
If you click the “Back up now” button, some of your files will move to your OneDrive folder and start syncing to the cloud.
Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
If you don’t want to enable this feature, you need to click on the very small blue link that says “Save files to this PC only”.
During testing, I noticed some configurations where simply clicking the OneDrive icon in File Explorer enabled the feature without confirmation and without warning. In recent versions of Windows 11, opening one of the known folders in File Explorer displays a prominent “Start Backup” button like the one shown here.
Clicking this button opens the Back up OneDrive folders dialog box, with all three folders selected.
Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
And there are other places in Windows where you may be asked if you want to back up your files. In most cases, it’s not clear that this feature will move your files to the cloud instead of just creating a backup.
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All of these options use a distinctly non-traditional definition of the word support. Most people think of “backing up” as a way of making copies of your files in a safe place while not touching the original files. As you’ll see, that’s not how this feature works. As I mentioned earlier, this can create chaos, especially if you don’t understand what’s going on.
So what happens when folder backup is enabled?
- First, Windows creates the Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders in the OneDrive folder in your user profile.
- Next, it resets the location of known folders to point to those newly created OneDrive instances.
- Finally, it syncs the OneDrive folder in your user profile with your OneDrive files in the cloud using your Microsoft account.
Your files are in C:\Users\Your_profile_name\Documents is currently in C:\Users\Your_profile_name\OneDrive\Documents. The Desktop and Pictures folders have also been relocated.
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And you may never notice. If you just use the shortcuts in the Windows 11 navigation bar, you’ll automatically open and save files from the new location. It’s magic!
Or is that so?
If you’ve paid for a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, you have 1 TB of OneDrive storage available, which is a lot of space. Unless you’re a digital hoarder, all your local files will fit neatly in the cloud, and they’ll actually be backed up and synced across all the devices you own. This is a good thing and you should not try to change it.
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Even a $1.99 per month Microsoft 365 Basic subscription gives you a generous 100GB of cloud storage, enough to satisfy backup needs for most people.
But things get dangerous if you decide you don’t want to pay Microsoft for their cloud storage. In that case, your free Microsoft account includes 5 GB of cloud storage, which isn’t bad but is pretty easy to use when in a hurry.
Things quickly become a problem if you’ve got a large collection of digital photos in your Pictures folder, or if you’ve stuffed your Documents folder with more than 5 GB of content. (It happens.)
In that case, you will run out of cloud storage and have problems backing up your files. The problem that backing up OneDrive folders was supposed to solve becomes a problem.
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Things also get confusing if you change File Explorer’s default to show all folders instead of using the simple Windows 11 navigation bar. In that case, you will see a set of empty folders in your personal profile (C:\Users\Your_profile_name\). And if you start trying to save new files there instead of into a known folder, things will get very messy, very quickly. You then have two completely separate Documents folders and their contents.
To restore order, you have three options.
Option 1: Pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription. If you do this, you can securely sync those local files with your 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage. This is actually a very good backup strategy and even protects you from ransomware attacks. However, there will be financial costs and you may not want to store your files in the cloud or may want to use another cloud storage service.
Option 2: Turn off OneDrive folder backup completely. To get started, open File Explorer, right-click the OneDrive icon in the navigation pane on the left, then select OneDrive > Manage OneDrive backups. That will open the dialog box shown below. For each folder that currently has folder backup enabled, slide the On/Off switch to the left position (Off), then click Save Changes
When you do that, Windows resets the default location of those known folders to folders in your local user profile. However, your saved files are still in your local OneDrive folder. You will need to open those folders and copy their contents back to your local drive to regain easy access.
The three folders at the top of this list are being synced with OneDrive. Slide the switch left to turn off folder backup.
Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
Unfortunately, when you do that, OneDrive doesn’t move your files back to the local folder where you expect them to be. Instead, it adds a shortcut to your local folder, pointing to the synced OneDrive folder containing those files.
When you turn off folder backup, your files remain in two places and you need to move them manually.
Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
If you want to move those files back to the default folder in your user profile, double-click that shortcut to open the OneDrive folder, press Ctrl+A to select every file, then press Ctrl+X to cut those files; then go back to your local folder and press Ctrl+V to paste the files in the correct location.
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Option 3: Use folder backups sparingly. This is a hybrid approach that allows you to take advantage of Microsoft’s 5 GB of free OneDrive cloud storage. You can continue to sync your known local folders to OneDrive, but make sure their total contents are under the 5 GB limit. Create separate archive folders for older files that you want to back up locally and not in the cloud. Of course, you need to make sure you have good backups of those archive folders.
It’s unfortunate that Microsoft has done such a poor job of documenting how OneDrive works because it’s an extremely reliable service and a great way to back up local files. Maybe someone on the OneDrive team will read this post and realize they need to rethink this feature so others don’t get annoyed by it.
This article was originally published on June 14, 2022 and last updated on October 27, 2024.
