“Deleting” OneDrive…

One of my promises to myself for 2026 — which admittedly feels a bit “puny” with everything going on — was to redraw from most cloud-based storage. Part of the broad “clean up!” phase of my mid-life crisis…

Leave social media
Leave [most] third party cloud-based storage [Google Drive is something of an exception, for now, and I have other specialty storage to handle certain accounts and servers]
Reduce streaming subscriptions to a minimum
Generally stop paying for services I can do myself with some sweat/tears

…which, when written like that, does sound a bit like I’m turning into a paranoid old codger. I am, that. But also, it gives me a challenge. Something to chew upon.

Today was OneDrive. I had some variation of the Office 365 subscription— which is now something like Office 365 Copilot — where I had apps, storage space, improvements to email, and upgrades to “freemium” MS stuff like Copilot++ Extreme Teams Plus™ or whatever branding makes the shareholders happy. I don’t know. The fact that I never knew what kind of value I could possible be getting from most of it is part of my problem.

Which is part of your problem, MS people.

Any Microsoft folks seeing this, that’s my feedback. Help me to feel like I am getting much more than $100 out of such a thing if you want me to keep it. Make it feel like you are giving me the sweetest deal ever. You ain’t a charity. You ain’t a college student just working your way up through the world. Impress me.

I got said annual subscription a few years back when I got this computer and continued, like a good little puppet, to pay the $100ish annual fee for all these many months. As we were prepping a move to the EU, I cut out most of my annual/recurring payments to stuff that wasn’t absolutely necessary, keeping only a few with some of those few on the eventual chopping block. This included my Office 365 [insert other branding terms, here] subscription though I figured I’d keep it if I wanted it after all.

If and only if I felt I was getting my value.

In the interim time, I set up more of my own storage, switched most/all documents to LibreOffice [etc], and started handling my email largely “in house.” In short, I absolutely did not need to pay a trillion dollar company $100 to do those things for me. Which left a problem.

There were roughly 500gig of files on my computer tied to OneDrive. Not paying meant my OneDrive was stuffed full to the brim — 9000% over the limit, the warnings said — and stuff was throwing errors. I logged in and started to delete out my files from the online side and then went…

…because while I doubted it, there was a non-zero chance that I was about to trigger Microsoft deleting half a terabytes of files off my PC. Good files. Stuff like my pdf copies of Outgunned and my Two Steps from Hell music. That would have made me sad having to redownload all that.

I stopped, looked into it, and figured out that I had to go through OneDrive’s settings and then stop syncing each of the major folders. One at a time. Which takes…time. It moves the folders around and changes the links and stuff. A few folders with only a gig or two worth of files might be quick but my main Documents folder which had 300gig alone took the better part of an hour. Then sit there in fear that it was simply going to delete those files outright [Ron Howard voice: it did not].

That’s before I had to go through and update some bookmarks, rebuild a music library in Foobar2000, and related things. Piece by piece.

Doug’s Note: There are walkthroughs already written for this process. I should have taken screenshots on the way down but didn’t think about it until later.

After I did all that, and dealt with all the errors, I then “resynced” and that deleted the files off my online account. I then deleted out a few more bits and then unlinked my account from OneDrive and then exited OneDrive.

Which has twice tried re-opening and which prompted Windows Defender to lecture me about the importance of having online backup, etc.

My primary annoyance since then is that the Default Library Folders — Documents, Pictures, Downloads, Videos, Desktop — are now put into kind of janky library containers in the “Libraries” tree at the bottom of the left-hand panel and there doesn’t seem to be a way to build a more functional version of that towards the top to match the older style.

In other words, paying for OneDrive put all those files into a convenient place in the panel which doesn’t seem possible, without possibly editing the registry, to replicate. That’s…madness, right? That’s purposely nerfing their own operating system to sell a side product.

Hey, looking for a book to read? Let me just suggest something. Probably totally unrelated to this whole experience: