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!

@ceoln place your docs in a non-MyDocs folder and mark it as offline, or exclude it from the OneDrive library, perhaps

@anjilslaire
My expectation is that various things would still put important files into a OneDrive-hostaged folder in that case, though.

I attribute a great deal of malicious intent to OneDrive. :D

@ceoln I feel the same about #GDrive, although (disclaimer: as a MS employee) I understand how to use OneDrive and keep what I want synced, and what I don't, not.
How do you feel about #Google drive?

@anjilslaire
Google drive is just a place on the web that I can copy things in and out of. :) As far as I know, it never inserts itself into the local machine's filesystem and copies stuff in and out on its own. Let alone doing that even when I've explicitly told it not to!

But then that's not the part of #Google that I work in, so maybe it has features that I don't use or know about.

I've never had a #ChromeOS machine start mirroring things into Google Drive, as far as I know! The thing that confuses me about Drive is exactly how it relates to Docs (and Photos, and...). But that's just a conceptual problem, not a "it's doing stuff without me asking" problem.

Am I overlooking something?

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

@anjilslaire

Oh, yes! :) I unlinked my previous PC at least twice, and both times it became "linked" again in whatever way (when Windows updated or something?).

The only way I knew it had done that was when I started getting the "pay us" popups. :)
'
Then when I got this new PC with Windows pre-installed, it of course had OneDrive pre-installed and turned on, and without my realizing it was uploading various things to the cloud and erasing them locally (!), and eventually I started getting the "Pay us" popups, and here I am!

I'm hoping that having set the magic registry setting will stick, although when I do a web search on the name of the key, some of what I get is people complaining about the key getting unexpectedly set (although set to the value that I want it to be, which might be comforting).

Maybe I should uninstall OneDrive completely, but then Windows tends to re-install stuff, so I dunno.

Suggestions always welcome, though! Thanks again.