Is OneDrive messing with your files? How to get your Windows storage under control
If you don’t pay careful attention when setting up a new Windows PC, you could find many of your data files suddenly relocated to the cloud. That might be a good thing, or it might be a mess. And, of course, Microsoft is frustratingly unhelpful when it comes to explaining how this feature works.
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Should this happen to you, please follow the one simple rule Douglas Adams set down so many years ago: Don’t panic. Before you do anything, it helps to understand exactly what’s going on.
When you set up a new user account on a Windows PC, Windows creates a set of standard 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:UsersUsername), 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 one additional folder in your profile, OneDrive, and gives that folder a prominent link in the navigation bar on the left side of File Explorer. After setup is complete, your user profile should look something like this:
This is what a fresh user profile looks like in Windows 11. Notice the wording under all those standard folders: “Stored locally”.
Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
The label under each of those known folders tells you they’re stored locally. All well and good, right?
Well, yes, until OneDrive decides to get involved.
When you set up a brand-new PC, it’s all too easy to blow right past the Out of Box Experience (OOBE) screen for this feature, which encourages you to click the “Back up now” button, as shown here.
If you click the “Back up now” button, some of your files move to the OneDrive folder and begin syncing to the cloud.
Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
If you do not want this feature enabled, you need to click the very small blue link that reads “Only save files to this PC.” During my testing, I found some configurations in which simply clicking the OneDrive icon in File Explorer turns on this feature, with no confirmation required and no 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 OneDrive Folder Backup dialog box, with all three folders selected.
Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
And there are other places in Windows where you might be asked ask you if you want to back up your files. In most cases, it’s not clear that this feature moves your files to the cloud instead of simply creating a backup copy.
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All of these options use a distinctly nontraditional definition of the word backup. Most people think of “backing up” as a way of making a copy of your files in a safe place, while leaving the original files untouched. As you’ll see, that is not how this feature works. As I mentioned earlier, this can create a mess, especially if you don’t understand what’s going on.
So, what happens when folder backup is on?
- First, Windows creates Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders in the OneDrive folder in your user profile.
- Next, it resets the location of the known folders to point to those newly created OneDrive versions.
- Finally, it syncs the OneDrive folder in your user profile with the OneDrive files in the cloud, using your Microsoft account.
Your files that were in C:UsersYour_profile_nameDocuments are now in C:UsersYour_profile_nameOneDriveDocuments. The Desktop and Pictures folders have also been relocated.
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And you might never notice. If you only use the shortcuts in the Windows 11 navigation bar, you’ll automatically open and save files from the new locations. It’s magic!
Or is it?
If you’ve paid for a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, you have 1 TB of OneDrive space available, which is a lot of space. Unless you are a digital hoarder, all your local files should fit in the cloud, and they will indeed 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 100 GB of cloud storage space, which should also be enough to handle backup needs for most people.
But things get dicey if you’ve decided you’d rather not pay Microsoft for their cloud storage. In that case, your free Microsoft account includes 5 GB of cloud storage, which is not bad, but also pretty easy to use up in a hurry.
Things quickly become problematic if you already have a large collection of digital photos in your Pictures folder, or if you’ve stuffed your Documents folder with more than 5 GB of stuff. (It happens.)
In that case, you will run out of cloud storage and you will run into problems backing up your files. The very problem that OneDrive folder backup was supposed to solve will become an issue.
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Things also become confusing if you change the File Explorer defaults to show all folders instead of using the simplified Windows 11 navigation bar. In that case, you will see a set of empty folders in your personal profile (C:UsersYour_profile_name). And if you start trying to save new files there instead of to the known folder, things get very messed up, very quickly. At that point, you have two Documents folders and their contents are completely separate.
To restore order, you have three choices.
The first is to pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription and back up those local files to OneDrive cloud storage. It’s actually a very good backup strategy and even protects you from ransomware attacks. But there’s a financial cost, and you might prefer not to have your files in the cloud, or you might prefer to use a different cloud storage service.
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Your second option is to turn off OneDrive folder backup completely. Open File Explorer, right-click the OneDrive icon in the navigation pane on the left and choose OneDrive > Manage OneDrive Backup. That opens this dialog box, where you can click Stop Backup under one or more of the three folders in question. When you do, Windows will change the location of those known folders back to the ones in your local user profile. Just be aware that your saved files are still in OneDrive. You’ll need to open those OneDrive folders and copy their contents back to your local drive to regain easy access.
If you don’t pay close attention, Windows will automatically set up your profile to sync these folders to OneDrive.
Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
When you do that, unfortunately, 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 are still in two places and you need to move them manually.
Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
If you want to move them back to your local storage and out of the cloud, use that shortcut to open the OneDrive folder, press Ctrl+A to select every file, then press Ctrl+X to cut those files; then return to your local folder and press Ctrl+V to move the files.
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The final option is a hybrid approach that allows you to take advantage of the 5 GB of free OneDrive cloud storage that Microsoft offers. You can keep backing up you local known folders to OneDrive, but create archive folders for older files you want to back up separately. Just make sure the total storage space for your Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders stays under 5 GB. And, of course, make sure you have good backups for those archive folders.
I agree that Microsoft has done a terrible job of documenting how OneDrive works. That’s a shame because it’s an extremely reliable service and it represents a great way to keep local files backed up. Maybe someone on the OneDrive team will read this post and realize they need to rethink this feature so others aren’t bedeviled by it.
This article was originally published on June 14, 2022, and last updated on September 25, 2024.
