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I recently got a new laptop and I'm not sure how windows 11 works. I noticed that my documents folder was just my OneDrive, which i don't want.
When i tried to redirect it to the main storage, i get:
I'm not sure how to get it to work.
I don't want to unlink my onedrive completely because i use it often to transfer files.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
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Hi. I'm Brian and I will do my best to help you.
Go into the Settings on OneDrive, select the Backup tab and uncheck Documents (and Desktop and Pictures if you wish) and those folders should get moved back to their position under C:\Users<youraccount>, unless you've manually created folders of the same name, which is not the correct approach.
One should not have to go into the registry to fix this problem!
Unbelievable
Nothing in their support documents even comes close to matching their intructions
The instructions I had for successfully getting rid of it on Windows 10 DO NOT work on Windows 11
If anything, it has screwed up Windows 11 explorer.
Microsoft -- you need to fix this and provide free telephone support for those of us who DO NOT WANT ONEDRIVE
This does not work at all.
Documents in File Explorer still point to username\oneddrive\docuemnts
Windows 11 just does not want to let go of Onedrive
We lost all the documents that were in that onedrive\documents folder
as well as pictures that were in the onedrive\pictures folder
It will not let us resurrect the original username\pictures folder in File explroer
Why is this so complicated?
Stop[ed the backup
unlinked device
That should have been the end of that story and File Explorer should have gone to being normal without OneDrive.
Get this Microsoft ---people who want to save to OneDrive can do so at their peril. They can learn to upload what they want into the cloud. It should not be the default.
This is just insane -- the implementation should should not have been to hijack the files and force people to use OneDrive by default.
All the tips and workarounds and the Microsoft Support documents have wrong information. Nothing seems to work in Windows 11 to "unhook" OneDrive
files should be going to c:\users\username
not
c:\users\onedrive\username
Naming items in OneDrive as Desktop, Documents, Pictures, etc is very misleading and causes tremendous confusion to users. They have no idea where their documents are stored. Microsoft should never have done that-- they should have labeled them as Onedrive-Desktop, Onedrive-Documents, Onedrive-Pictures. That would have been real clear. They should have left the original Documents, Desktop and Pictures alone.
Now with
the backup stopped
and the device unlinked from the computer
Files are lost (they are not in the Onedrive\username\documents folder
File explorer still shows Documents pointing to OneDrive but the folder is empty
This is just sheer madness.
