Stop Office BACKUP THIS DOCUMENT prompt

I found this. It 'seemed' to work on two documents which opened today with the backup message. After performing the following steps, I closed the two documents, and then reopened them. They did not have the back up message. I don't have a lot of confidence that it will be a permanent fix. You know Microsoft...

Step 1: Type Control Panel in the Search box and click it to open it.

Step 2: Go to Security and Maintenance > Change Security and Maintenance settings.

Step 3: Under the Maintenance messages part, uncheck the Windows Backup box and click OK.

The 'fix' is easy.

• If you need to use OneDrive, use the registry patch code provided much earlier in this discussion.
• If you don't need or want OneDrive, uninstall it.

Well, until something better is found...

I have a solution that is working for me. I created a batch file that updates the "KFMLastDismissTimestamp" registry entry with the current time, then created a scheduled task to run that script each day. That fools KFM into thinking the nag banner has been dismissed within the last 24 hours, and it does not display it again.

I had first tried setting that timestamp way into the future (like 2025), but that doesn't work -- the nag screen comes back immediately. But setting it daily to the current time seems to do the trick.

The batch file content is attached below if anyone else wants to go this route.

@echo off 



setlocal 



call :GetEpochTime EPOCH_TIME 



reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\KFM /v KFMLastDismissTimestamp /t REG_DWORD /d %EPOCH_TIME% /f 



goto :EOF 



 



:GetEpochTime 



setlocal enableextensions 



for /f %%x in ('wmic path win32_utctime get /format:list ^| findstr "="') do ( 



    set %%x) 



set /a z=(14-100%Month%%%100)/12, y=10000%Year%%%10000-z 



set /a ut=y*365+y/4-y/100+y/400+(153*(100%Month%%%100+12*z-3)+2)/5+Day-719469 



set /a ut=ut*86400+100%Hour%%%100*3600+100%Minute%%%100*60+100%Second%%%100 



endlocal & set "%1=%ut%" & goto :EOF

Is the batch file approach still working? It sounds like the best option. For some reason Windows wouldn't run a BAT file but it seemed to accept CMD.

FWIW, in a separate thread I and many others have complained about Microsoft's "backup means we'll take your files out of your control" seize-and-screw strategy with OneDrive. There aren't any MS employees in the forums, just volunteers, so our only "hope" is complaining through the built-in feedback system (though everyone needs to do that anyway!). But even some MVPs have said they don't like what MS did.

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?

"Well....when I went in to check my version, I stumbled on the answer. Under Account / Account Privacy / Manage Settings, all you have to do is disable connected experiences and it will remove all connections to Microsoft server (except Outlook if you use it). Doing so removes the option to save to OneDrive!!!!"

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/get-rid-of-onedrive-save-option-in-excelword/98754d5d-1068-4b8d-ad99-0e0992e12216

May not be the solution one wants though. Quicknotes stops working, and I expect some other stuff does as well.

You can uninstall OneDrive like any other program - go to Settings / Apps and Features, and then finding it in the list of apps and taking the uninstall option.

Regarding your Documents and Desktop folders ... if you right-click on Desktop in Windows Explorer and then look under the Location tab, it will tell you the physical location of that folder. It defaults to c:\users[username]\desktop, BUT if you have opted for OneDrive's so called automatic backup (which is nothing of the kind), then OneDrive may have changed the location to itself - i.e. c:\users[username]\onedrive\desktop. If that is the case then you need to move the desktop folder back to the default, or to some other location outside OneDrive, BEFORE uninstalling OneDrive. To do that, in the Desktop folder properties window, click Location, then Move.

Same goes for the Documents folder.

Please note that uninstalling OneDrive does not delete your data held on the Onedrive cloud. It simply removes the Explorer "plugin" so that you cannot directly access OneDrive as a folder in Windows. But if you go to https://onedrive.live.com and sign in, you'll see all your files are still there.

Sorry, I have no idea whether it's possible to uninstall OneDrive for one user and leave it installed for another. Knowing Microsoft, it might work or it might not. My advice would be to uninstall it for all users, and use a free Dropbox (or other similar cloud) account instead. That's what I did, and it is the only way, it appears, to get rid of these stupid prompts.

All the above applies to Windows 10 - haven't a clue what happens in 11.