Hi All,


Though I regularly use Dropbox and Google Drive, I find Microsoft's One 
Drive incredibly invasive. I think the difference is that I feel like I 
have full control over when and what goes into Dropbox and Drive but 
that One Drive, in its efforts to be helpful and accommodating, is 
pretty pushy about saving all my stuff to Microsoft's cloud whether I 
want it there or not. So I've been trying to figure out how One Drive 
works and how I can disable it. I'm posting my findings in case others 
are in the same boat. Btw, I'm running Windows 10 Anniversary, but this 
is also true of a few other versions.


By default, newer versions of Windows want to save things to One Drive. 
This applies to Word files, email attachments, and more. It's confusing 
because pressing ins+t in the Save dialog says you're in Documents, but 
when you go to the usual Documents Folder (i.e., you click your name, 
then Documents), your files are not there. So where are they?

If you open This PC, you find Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, and 
Videos at the top and Devices and Drives, which includes OS and your DVD 
drive, at the bottom. Pressing Enter on Documents here actually opens 
One Drive and shows you your files.

In some cases, you can change this behavior by going into the settings 
for an app to change the Save Location. For example, in Word, you go 
into Files > Options > Save, choose an option that says something like 
Save on Local Computer, and browse to a new Save location. When you 
browse, you'll start in the Documents that is associated with One Drive, 
so you'll need to use backspace to move up to This PC, then enter or 
right-arrow to go into Devices and Drives > OS > Users > your name > 
Documents.

You can also disable One Drive. The instructions that were easiest to 
follow are the ones provided by Microsoft:
https://support.office.com/en-US/article/Turn-off-or-uninstall-OneDrive-f32a17ce-3336-40fe-9c38-6efb09f944b0
Basically, I went into the notifications Overflow area by tabbing to 
Notification Chevron, pressing space on the chevron, and left-arrowing. 
On the One Drive icon, I pressed the context key, went into Settings, 
and made the changes described in the article.

I made one additional change, clicking Unlink This PC. Almost 
immediately, I got a nag asking me to link my computer. I pressed escape 
or maybe alt+f4 to exit, thinking the nag would just come back, but it 
hasn't so far.

Just sharing with the class.

Ciao


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