Stop Office BACKUP THIS DOCUMENT prompt

Anonymous
2023-11-04T15:55:46+00:00

Excel and Word keep displaying a banner when I open a file "BACKUP THIS DOCUMENT - Access this file anywhere with OneDrive included in your subscription"

I have a backup system I use that I like and I don't need OneDrive to backup my files. How do I get OneDrive/Office 365/Windows to stop giving me this prompt?

I click the "X" or Schedule Backup Later to make the banner go away, but it just comes back a little while later. I've opened up the OneDrive app from the system tray and unselected everything from the OneDrive backup, but none of this helps and the prompt keeps coming back.

How do I get this to stop?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-05-28T13:12:05+00:00

    This is what I eventually had to do as well to stop it. Turning off the backup flag in the Control panel did stop the backup requests, as advertised, but only for about a week. Then the flag mysteriously started turning itself back on and I was back to getting the backup notices in my Office applications.

    It's ironic that Microsoft's intention of forcing people to eventually have to use OneDrive, which we all know will eventually be a forced monetary charge on us, is actually resulting in us disabling OneDrive as the only way to get around the pain in the butt practices Microsoft is building into it.

    I've been in product development for 43 years. I'd hate to be in an environment where my manager is telling me to do something to the code I'm developing which will be so obviously annoying and unjustified to the users.

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-05-28T11:07:23+00:00

    Indeed. "Switch on OneDrive" = "Contains in-app purchases"

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  4. Anonymous
    2025-05-28T11:02:37+00:00

    How about you answer the person's question? How do you switch off the prompt to save your documents to OneDrive?

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  5. Anonymous
    2025-05-22T12:17:51+00:00

    Unlink your computer from onedrive following the instructions below. This solved it for me.

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-or-uninstall-onedrive-f32a17ce-3336-40fe-9c38-6efb09f944b0

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