Oh My God, it's happening again.

I have a new Windows laptop, which means that #Microsoft #OneDrive has been stealthily taking various important-looking files hostage in its cloud, unasked for.

And now it's started sending me the threatening "we're getting low on storage space to hold all these important files, wouldn't you like to pay us money to make sure that nothing Bad happens to them?" popups.

It's horrific.

I have tried (in other times, on other computers) to turn off / remove / eradicate OneDrive, but it always comes back, and in every repetition of attempted destruction and re-emergence, it has scattered more little "Where are my files?" links around my disks, moved more of my files around, and made me suspect that more stuff has been lost.

How is this even legal?

I should just wean myself off. The thought of having to adopt to running various programs that I'm used to (the Firestorm viewer, Satisfactory, Wow, I dunno) is somehow enough to stop me from doing that, although compared to the horrors of OneDrive it seems a small enough price.

Perhaps I tell myself that THIS time I will surely defeat OneDrive once and for all!

Okay, I have now:

In its settings, told #OneDrive to keep everything locally.

Told OneDrive to "unlink" or whatever this "PC". (Because of the prior thing, the "Are you sure?" popup didn't darkly hint that I would lose access to some files, which is nice.)

Turned off every setting in the OneDrive settings that appeared to tell it to do anything.

Gone into regedit and in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\OneDrive

made a DWORD key called

DisableFileSyncNGSC

and set it to 1 (one).

We'll see if that works!

#Windows still thinks that my official #Documents "folder" has a path name containing "OneDrive", but perhaps that is benign...