Forum Discussion
How to eliminate OneDrive in paths?
I am setting up a new computer for performance-sensitive tasks (it's a church PC we use for streaming among several volunteers, using a single account). I'm installing Windows 11 Pro. I don't want anything to pull from the cloud or sync to the cloud while doing these tasks, to avoid unexpected performance disruptions to the stream. I want everything stored locally. So I don't want my accounts using OneDrive for things like the Documents folder, or any other for that matter. I've unlinked the account from OneDrive.
But somehow, my app Documents are being created in a folder like:
C:\Users\Bob\OneDrive\Documents
instead of
C:\Users\Bob\Documents (which exists, but remains empty)
Since I've unlinked the account, I think it's no longer syncing, which is good. But those paths are bound to cause confusion when people look for things. Is there a way to eliminate the OneDrive folder from the standard paths in my home folder, or create a new account without that folder in the paths?
How could I have avoided this during Windows installation? If necessary I will reinstall to fix this.
Thanks!
To follow-up, in case anyone has this issue:
It's becoming increasingly difficult to opt-out of Cloud Sync of user directories/accounts. This is frustrating, because there are some tasks that are performance critical. During such tasks we do not want unsolicited background activity occurring such as syncing to the cloud, because that can cause performance impacts. Imagine streaming video and simultaneously recording it to local disk. If local disk data is syncing to the cloud while you are streaming, you're using twice as much network bandwidth!!
The only way I found to avoid this, during OS installation, was to deliberately input invalid Microsoft credentials. If you do this (I seem to recall having to do it twice) the Installation process will fall back on legacy mode without Cloud Sync.
Now obviously, you should always back up your work, because things can break and you don't want to lose anything critical. And for many/most users, Cloud Sync to OneDrive will be very convenient because it transparently backups your data in the background.
But for people who want to conserve computer resources (e.g. CPU, network, memory, storage IOPS) during performance-sensitive tasks such as Live Streaming, it's desirable to disable background tasks as much as possible, and to perform backups manually as needed. This was the only way I found to do so.
