Following My Own OneDrive Advice (Premium)

I wasn’t expecting to follow up on my OneDrive adventures so quickly, but after seeing the issue I raised escalate over the weekend, I had to act. And in the spirit of trying to be more positive when possible, another topic I wasn’t expecting to follow up on so quickly, it went better than I expected.

In How To Fix OneDrive’s Bad Behavior in Windows 11 (Premium), I outlined how the problems with OneDrive integration have escalated since the initial version of Windows 11, and how to fix each. But some of the issues are new to Windows 11 version 23H2, which isn’t finalized yet, suggesting that maybe—hopefully–at least one of them is just a bug. Unfortunately, I’ve moved most of my PCs over to 23H2 (via the Release Preview channel) because I need to document it for the Windows 11 Field Guide. And I have now experienced the behavior that triggered that previous OneDrive article—it is forcing OneDrive Folder Backup on me after I explicitly opt out of it—on three different PCs. So I had to do something.

Otherwise, I might have waited a while longer.

As I wrote in that previous article, I have been using OneDrive’s default top-level folder organizational scheme—with Apps, Desktop, Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders in the root—since it was a thing. And it’s worked well, for the most part: I use the Documents and Pictures folders extensively, and these are of course my most important data stores, but I also use all of the other folders. The issue is that Windows can auto-enable Folder Backup, a OneDrive feature I do not want to use, in certain situations. In doing so, local folders of files that should not be synced to the cloud are synced, and not just to the cloud, but to my other PCs. Where they intermingle with the personal data that I care about.

I do not want this. And in testing Google Drive integration with Windows, which is surprisingly good by the way, it occurred to me that I could work around this problem. Not fix it per se, given that a real fix would include Microsoft turning off the many suggestions throughout Windows that advertise this feature and actually respecting the choices I make. But work around it. And the workaround is simple enough: Just don’t use any of those OneDrive folders.

This is scary.

And as I finished up that article late Friday afternoon, right around the time my wife starts coming around to see when we might be leaving for dinner unless I’ve already started getting ready, it occurred that maybe waiting on this change was prudent. After all, I just went through an incredible digital decluttering process that involved, among other things, the reorganization and decluttering of my massive documents archive, which was and still is hosted in OneDrive. (I also backed up it to Google Drive, my NAS, and OneDrive for Business.) And I had some hairy moments with OneDrive due to File Explorer performance issues especially. One does not muck about in file systems this important without thinking it through first.

And so I did. Saturday came and went without a decision, but I did get about 100 videos transferred over to the “new” Thurrott.com YouTube channel, which is actually the original Thurrott.com YouTube channel, but the less said about that, the better. (Actually, they were all transferred weeks ago, what I did was publish them, making them available publicly.) That felt like progress, and so on Sunday, I underwent a task I’d been putting off for weeks. I reset my desktop PC.

That isn’t normally a big deal, as I reset PCs all the time. But the desktop PC is where I capture the screen recordings for Hands-On Windows, and the OBS Studio configuration is quite specific, and I wasn’t looking forward to going through that. But it has had its own escalating series of issues over time, mostly performance-related, and it was overdue.

This PC is also one of the PCs I upgraded to Windows 11 version 23H2 using the Windows Insider Program’s Release Preview channel. As I have written/said elsewhere, I get inconsistent results on these upgrades because of Microsoft’s use of its Controlled Feature Release (CFR) technology. But I did notice that if I got to 23H2 and didn’t see all the new features, I could reset the PC, and that usually does the trick. So I was hoping that would be the case with the desktop PC.

And it was. Which is nice on one level, but also problematic: Though I had opted out of Folder Backup during Setup, and had explicitly checked to make sure it was off on the first boot, I discovered later in the day that this feature had silently been enabled behind my back. This is the third PC on which this has happened so far. And with more and more of my PCs moving to 23H2, it occurred that I would likely experience this issue on each.

(To be clear, this could be a bug. As noted, 23H2 is not completed yet and maybe this is just a temporary and unintended issue. But that doesn’t matter to me: It’s an issue that does impact me right now, and on multiple PCs. And by working around Windows 11’s need for me to use Folder Backup by creating my own folder structure in OneDrive, maybe I could stop stressing over this. I could just let it backup/sync those folders without worrying about my data, which would be elsewhere and unaffected.)

Anyway, this issue inspired me to take action.

It’s impossible to know for sure how OneDrive does certain things, but with the previous File Explorer performance issues in the back of my mind, I decided to make the changes to OneDrive on the web instead of on one of my PCs. But I was curious to see how Windows 11 handled those changes, too, because my decluttering work caused a lot of OneDrive commotion on various PCs as they looked for, found, and then dealt with the folder organizational changes I had made elsewhere. OneDrive was often in a state of confusion during this time.

The first step was to pick a top-level folder name that would contain all my OneDrive data in the form of those Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders. I had thought about this a lot, worried about the impact of a too-long name on the folders I’d be copying inside there because I didn’t want to hit some kind of path length limit (as I had on OneDrive for Business, by the way). And here, there was no inspiration. I just went with a folder named Paul. And inside that folder, I created new Apps, Documents, Music, Photos (which I prefer to “Pictures”), and Videos subfolders. Simple.

I’m not religious and I won’t admit to genuflecting, but I did pause for a moment before taking the next step. Which was to move the contents of one of my root folders into the corresponding folder under Paul.

And I overcame my fear by starting small, with the Apps folder. This folder is small, just over 3 GB, and more importantly, is non-essential. I don’t want to lose the handful of app and app-related items in there. But I could survive it.

With that worry calmed, I selected the Apps folder’s contents—CTRL + A works in OneDrive on the web, go figure—and then the “Move to” toolbar button. And then I chose the destination, Paul > Archive, and clicked “Move to” to consummate the change. It processed this change with a little “Moving items” animation in the top right. And then it finished. When I checked the destination folder, everything was there as expected.

The Music folder was next. This one is just over 8 GB in size and is as non-essential as Apps–it contains just some subset of my digital music collection that I can sync to Spotify if needed—and it unsurprisingly made the move error-free and just as quickly. And then Videos, which contains only the finished videos my wife and I have recorded for our Eternal Spring YouTube channel and one other video; this, too, is non-essential in the scheme of things and it takes up over 61 GB right now. Again, no issues.

And then I had to tackle the bigger (literally) and more important (also literally) Documents and Pictures folders, which weigh in at 225 GB and 440 GB, respectively.

I moved the contents of the Documents folder first and, as expected, this one processed for a while. But then it returned with an error, triggering that stab of fear in my gut. One item wasn’t moved, I was told, the Archive folder that contains my personal and work archives and takes up 209 GB of the Document folder’s 225 GB total. Ah boy.

Worried again about that imagined path length issue, I created an Archive folder in Paul > Documents. The original Archive contains Personal and Work folders, and so I moved Personal first, created a Work folder manually. And because Documents > Archive > Work contains 13 date-based year folders currently (2011 through 2023), plus Books, Penton, and Websites folders, started moving over those sub-folders in batches. Each moved over without any issues. By the time I was done, I was curious as to why the original Archive folder move had failed. But there are no answers.

Finally, it was time for the Pictures folder. Here, I had a different concern because this folder contains a Camera Roll folder that’s used by OneDrive on my phones to back up their photos to the cloud. So I first moved all of the folders in Pictures, except Camera Roll, to Paul > Photos, about 185 GB of content, with no issues.

And then after cleaning up the mess I had left behind (see below), I decided just to go for it: OneDrive might create a new Camera Roll in Pictures, which was fine with me. Or it may be smart enough to use the same folder in its new location.

And there, I have good news: I took photos out in the world on Sunday afternoon, and they backed up to OneDrive when we got home to the Wi-Fi. And when I checked to see how that went, I was surprised and happy to see that it backed up to the Camera Roll’s new location in Paul > Photos. Nice.

But before that little success story unfolded, I returned to the root of OneDrive on the web and took that next slightly scary step: After ensuring that the original Apps, Desktop, Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders were empty, I deleted the Apps, Desktop, Music, and Videos folders, leaving Documents and Pictures there as empty shells of their former selves. But as I expected, the Desktop folder (non?) mysteriously reappeared later, most likely because it’s one of three folders in Folder Backup. And Microsoft will not be denied. That’s fine: My OneDrive now has Desktop, Documents, Paul, and Pictures folders in its root, alongside a Personal Vault entry. It’s clean enough.

And I have more good news.

You will recall I was worried about OneDrive having to resync the admittedly seismic folder changes I had made in the cloud. This would be bad enough on one PC, but because I’m me, it would have to do it across many PCs. And that could be a freaking disaster.

I had a Plan B for this eventuality: I could simply unlink OneDrive on each PC in turn, rename or delete the original folder, and then re-link OneDrive, keeping its default folder location. After all, I don’t sync that much data from OneDrive to my PCs, just my “To-do” and “Book” folders, both of which are in Documents > Work (and, temporarily, a folder in Pictures/Photos for the scans I’m still working on).

But maybe I wouldn’t need Plan B. I signed in on a laptop and watched to see what would happen. The OneDrive icon in the system tray did its “Checking for features” thing, and then started syncing … something. Looking at it, I could see that it was just a small amount of data, and not the entire thing as I’d feared. In fact, it finished quickly and then went back into its normal dormant state. Interesting.

And suspicious. So I opened File Explorer and navigated to the OneDrive folder (Paul – Personal on that PC, it seems to have different names and is in a different location in the navigation bar on different PCs, another delightful little bit of uncertainty my ADHD-addled brain is trying not to obsess over). Did the new folder structure already replicate locally? Could it possibly happen that quickly?

Yes and yes. And as good, those folders that I had marked for offline use–again, To-do, Book, and the folder with the recent scans—were all still correctly available offline from their new locations in the file system. Very nice.

I also pin a few folder locations to the navigation bar in File Explorer. Normally, there are three from OneDrive—Book, To-do, and the current monthly archive (2023-10 right now)—but because I’m also experimenting with Google Drive, the latter two are now Drive shortcuts. But Book is still on OneDrive, and its shortcut link in the Quick access section in the navigation bar still works fine. Also nice.

From there, I checked the rest of the PCs that I have here in the apartment (many are now in storage at the next place thanks to our pre-move decluttering). And each seemed to handle the OneDrive transition seamlessly, with no issues. That’s fantastic, and I was starting to think that my worries about this change had been overblown. That OneDrive, for all its very real problems in Windows 11, did at least handle a fairly major change to how I organize my files in a near-ideal way. The PCs were all fine and the photo backups on my phones were fine with no additional configuration required anywhere.

And then Monday came.

Oh, Monday. The stories are all true. I sat down at the desktop PC I had reset Sunday and in a rare moment of proactive thinking, I actually opened Teams before Brad called to record First Ring Daily (FRD) to make sure the audio-video devices were configured correctly, a common issue with Teams on the best of days, but something that could be understandably misconfigured given the reset. And I discovered that my microphone was unavailable. Was, in fact, not available anywhere in the system. It was like it didn’t exist.

I messaged Brad and went through all the normal troubleshooting steps. But the microphone—really, the Focusrite device through which it connects to my PC—cannot be found. I ended up recording FRD on my phone with the expectation that I would solve the microphone mystery sometime today, as I have four more FRD episodes and Windows Weekly to deal with this week. But it’s still broken despite my having spent over an hour on this.

Worse, when I was writing today’s From the Editor’s Desk editorial this morning, which is ironically about tech never working correctly, OneDrive unexpectedly coughed up a hairball on that same desktop PC. Maybe it’s cursed: OneDrive told me it was signing me out but didn’t say why, and when I opened the OneDrive window, it sat there without doing anything for a long time before finally quitting. So I re-ran OneDrive and was told I’d need to sign in. As if I’d never done so.

I considered rebooting to see if it would just sign in normally, but I went through the Microsoft account (MSA) email account/2FA two-step immediately instead and was told that there was already a OneDrive synced in the default location. Did I want to use a new location or merge with the version on disk? I wrote above somewhere about a Plan B, and this might have been the time to evoke it. But the files were all synced already, so I chose the merge. Which sent OneDrive down a one-hour sinkhole during which it rescanned the whole thing before finally syncing normally.

And that was literally what I had expected of each PC after the folder moves I had made in the cloud. Not a big deal, and this hasn’t happened on my other PCs. Though, to be sure, I manually checked each after that little stunt and am writing this now on a laptop specifically so I can monitor OneDrive. There have been no issues.

I am still very interested in fully solving the OneDrive issues I wrote about previously, and would very much prefer that Microsoft respects our choices and doesn’t relentlessly promote and even force Folder Backup on its users. But this simple workaround seems to work great across all the PCs I’ve tested it on, even with the potentially unrelated problem I had on the one desktop PC. It’s all good.

Not perfect. But good.