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
    2025-06-10T16:42:31+00:00

    Did not work for me. I am desperate to fix this. Very annoying to have to close the banner every time I start Word or Excel.

    As a cloud hater, it is very weird that Microsoft is constantly trying to push cloud services in my face.

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-06-10T17:27:27+00:00

    There are two scripts in this thread which will solve the problem (a Batch file posted by me on 12/2/2023 and a Powershell equivalent posted by Denver Root on 12/5/2023). Both do the same thing, which is reset the "nag countdown date" to fool Office into believing the "nag" has been displayed and acknowledged today, so that it will not be displayed again.

    The scripts need to be run daily via Task Scheduler. You need to copy/paste the script of your choice into a plain text file, with either a .bat or .ps1 suffix as appropriate for the script type you choose. Then create a Task Scheduler entry to automatically run the script daily. This will eliminate the Office "backup this document" banners from appearing.

    The only other method that consistently works is to uninstall OneDrive. If you want access to OneDrive but do not want the periodic "backup this document" prompts, one of the scripts mentioned (with a Task Scheduler entry to run it daily) will eliminate the prompts.

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  5. Anonymous
    2025-07-18T01:23:48+00:00

    "What is the product that Microsoft is selling? It is YOU! If they have all of your work, they can mine it to characterize you, create a behavioral profile, and sell that information to those who can exploit it. I don't know if they actually do this, but they CAN do it if you let them be your storage bin. They seem to have backed off lately on ramming Bing and Edge down our throats. For a while, everywhere you might accidentally click set Bing as yourg search provider and Edge as your browser. And that annoying research window in Excel that cannot be turned off.... But now a new intrusion is coming: their wonderful AI assistant will be in your face full-screen popup blocking your work, whether you like it or not."

    Convoluted and needlessly conspiratorial. The rationale is far more right in front of your nose. They do this to pester you into using their cloud services, because giving in is the easy way for most, so that you then end up buying more of the same and giving them more money. Simple, effective and odious. There is no guessing, this is exactly what they do do, openly, it works, it earns them a fortune, it IS why they do it. No shady data theft required.

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