Need Help with MS One Drive

For general computer discussion & help, come here

Moderators: Bakhtosh, EvilHomer3k

Post Reply
User avatar
Grifman
Posts: 22167
Joined: Wed Oct 13, 2004 7:17 pm

Need Help with MS One Drive

Post by Grifman »

First off, let me say I hate One Drive. It's a good idea but it's implementation is very flawed for a gamer. A lot of games make their saves in the My Documents folder which is backed up by One Drive, which leads to One Drive running out of capacity and MS wanting to sell you more space. Unfortunately, MS won't let you exclude any folders in My Documents so there's no way to stop creating a large number of files in One Drive, which is entirely stupid IMO, except I guess MS uses it to rent you more space in the cloud.

All that said I turned it off, then I deleted everything in One Drive except for the My Games folder. But then when I looked at My Documents on my hard drive nothing was there. I am confused, I thought One Drive only make a copy of your PC My Documents file. So that is confusing me. Am I missing something? I want the data on my hard drive, not in the cloud where it runs out of space.

I did go to the One Drive website and get everything back out of the Recycle Bin, but when I got to the One Cloud Drive folder in File Explorer nothing appears.

So I am very confused. Since I turned One Drive off, do I need to turn it back on? I guess I just want it back where it was - for at least now. Then I'll figure how to get rid of it in a better fashion. Any help would be appreciated.

I hate One Drive.

Edit - Ok, I had to reinstall One Drive after I had turned it off to get everything back. At least it is there now. But I'd still much rather turn it off and have everything on my hard drive. Is there a way to do without MS screwing me up. Because I almost just lost everything which I guess would be my fault, but MS doesn't make it easy and the site I googled to figure out what to do, didn't really warn me what I was really doing.

I hate One Drive.

Edit: To be clear, I just want My Documents to be saved on my hard drive. I read there's way to have it both on One Drive and my hard drive, but I haven't found how to do that yet. Any help would be appreciated.

I hate One Drive

Edit: What was driving this is that Skyrim would no longer let me save any games. I deleted some older save games, checked my virus protection, and ran an integrity check through Steam on the game. But no go. The only thing else it could seem to be was One Drive (according to all I googled), It seems that even though I had turned off One Drive, it was somehow still controlling whether I had any "space" to save any further as I was over my One Drive limt of 5 gigs. And, yes, once I reinstalled One Drive, deleted about 1.5 gig in old Fallout 4 saves, voila', I was able to save again in Skyrim. So it had to be One Drive striking from beyond the grave.

Turns out, I do have the settings where One Drive saves to both the cloud and my PC as it is redownloading all the files to my PC from the cloud. But I'd still like to turn off One Drive, delete everything in it, and stop it from still have some sort of control over my hard drive even from beyond the grave. Apparently what I did the first time did not work as it ended up deleting what was on my PC's hard drive.

I hate One Drive.
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions. – G.K. Chesterton
User avatar
naednek
Posts: 11118
Joined: Tue Oct 19, 2004 9:23 pm

Re: Need Help with MS One Drive

Post by naednek »

I hate it when OneDrive posts in the wrong subforum :P
hepcat - "I agree with Naednek"
User avatar
Grifman
Posts: 22167
Joined: Wed Oct 13, 2004 7:17 pm

Re: Need Help with MS One Drive

Post by Grifman »

naednek wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2025 4:30 pm I hate it when OneDrive posts in the wrong subforum :P
Yeah, I just realized this. Will send note to mods to see if they can move it. Sorry :oops:
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions. – G.K. Chesterton
User avatar
$iljanus
Forum Moderator
Posts: 14060
Joined: Wed Oct 13, 2004 3:46 pm
Location: New England...or under your bed

Re: Need Help with MS One Drive

Post by $iljanus »

Lucky for you it worked out. I didn't have my reading glasses and doing it on the phone was cumbersome. First I had to find the right menu because I haven't moved a topic in a while. Glad it didn't end up in R&P by accident :P
"Who's going to tell him that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?"
-Michelle Obama 2024 Democratic Convention

Wise words of warning from Smoove B: Oh, how you all laughed when I warned you about the semen. Well, who's laughing now?
User avatar
Grifman
Posts: 22167
Joined: Wed Oct 13, 2004 7:17 pm

Re: Need Help with MS One Drive

Post by Grifman »

$iljanus wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2025 6:46 pm Lucky for you it worked out. I didn't have my reading glasses and doing it on the phone was cumbersome. First I had to find the right menu because I haven't moved a topic in a while. Glad it didn't end up in R&P by accident :P
Thanks for moving it. Mistakes have been made, lessons have been learned :)
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions. – G.K. Chesterton
fullstrike
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Feb 11, 2025 9:39 am

Re: Need Help with MS One Drive

Post by fullstrike »

Yeah, OneDrive can be a real pain, especially for gamers dealing with saves getting tangled up in its sync nonsense. Microsoft's whole push to make OneDrive the default for everything is frustrating when all you want is your files on your hard drive and only your hard drive.😊
Post Reply