How To Fix OneDrive’s Bad Behavior in Windows 11 (Premium)

OneDrive has put me in a bad spot in recent months. I use it and rely on it, especially in Windows, where its file system integration features make it a no-brainer. But it’s also gotten worse—has gradually enshittified—with each passing Windows 11 version. And it appears that in the newest version, Windows 11 version 23H2, it’s going to get even worse.

It’s one thing to complain, but for now, I’d like to simply solve the problems. What can we do to work around—or better yet, solve—OneDrive’s bad behaviors?

The good news is that it’s possible. The bad news is that we may still need to monitor OneDrive in Windows 11 from time to time, unless of course we choose the nuclear option and opt for a different cloud storage service that offers Windows file system integration, like Apple iCloud, Box, Dropbox, or Google Drive, or, oddly, a Microsoft 365 commercial account. Given my history with OneDrive, I’d rather not go down that path. But I’m also experimenting now just in case.

Anyway, let’s step through the issues. They are …

Microsoft requires you to use a Microsoft account to sign into Windows 11

The first issue, sort of, is that Microsoft requires you to sign in with a Microsoft account (MSA) when you install Windows 11 Home and Pro now. There are various workarounds for that—please reference the Clean Install and Local Accounts chapters in the Windows 11 Field Guide for various methods—but most people are better off using an MSA sign-in. I certainly am, and I do. So most of us will need to work within this system.

Microsoft automatically enables OneDrive Folder Backup during Windows Setup

Given that, the real first issue is that Microsoft enables OneDrive Folder Backup—which redirects your user account’s Desktop, Document, and Pictures folders to locations in OneDrive, keeping them in sync with the cloud—during Windows Setup (and right after you sign into your MSA). It does this with Windows 11 Home and, increasingly, with Windows 11 Pro, though in the latter case you will often see a choice to enable/disable this feature.

To be clear, there is a case to be made for Folder Backup, especially for those mainstream users who only use a single PC and will later restore from a backup if they replace or reset that PC. But Folder Backup isn’t just one of many ways in which we might achieve the resiliency and reliability of keeping our most important files synced to some cloud storage service, it’s the dumbest way.

And as such, it is only appropriate for the most non-technical of users. The rest of us—people reading this site, for example—can do better. That is, we can make cloud storage work for us instead of conforming to Microsoft’s simplistic and non-scalable system. (What’s non-scalable? In this case, it’s anyone who uses two or more PCs.) I outline my current system in Don’t Be a Statistic (Premium), but we’re going to look at that topic a bit more in a moment.

For now, let’s work around it. If you don’t want or need Folder Backup, you will want to open OneDrive settings immediately after booting into the Windows 11 Desktop for the first time and disable it. In fact, you should do so whether Setup gives you the option to configure it or not.

How you do so varies because there are three different versions of OneDrive in Windows 11, and what you see will change based on which you have. In one version, it’s in OneDrive settings > Backup > “Manage backup.”

But in the two more recent versions, it’s in OneDrive settings > Sync and backup > Back up important folders to OneDrive > “Manage backup.”

Depending on the version of OneDrive you’re using, Folder Backup can sync three or five folders to the cloud (and then to other devices). But automatic Folder Backup will only enable this sync on three of the folders: Desktop, Documents, and Pictures. You have to manually enable folder sync for the other two, your Music and Videos folders. (Assuming you see those choices: Only one of the three OneDrive versions you might see offers this. It’s the most recent version.)

If you do not want Folder Backup, toggle each of the automatically enabled options to “Off.”

Microsoft may silently enable automatic Folder Backup after you’ve said no

This is the problem that touched off my article Sadly, Now We Need to Talk About OneDrive (Premium): In Windows 11 version 23H2, it appears that not only is Microsoft escalating its forced automatic Folder Backup configuration for those on Pro, but it is also ignoring you if you are given the option and chose the “only save files to this PC” option during Setup. To be fair to Microsoft, 23H2 is not complete at the time of this writing and it’s still possible that this is a bug.

But if it isn’t a bug, that means that those who do not want Folder Backup (on any or all of those three folders for which this could be automatically enabled) will need to check OneDrive settings, not just right away but from time to time. You don’t want to discover belatedly that this feature was enabled without warning, as has now happened to me.

OneDrive integration with File Explorer is getting to be a bit much

OneDrive’s file system integration in Windows is incredible and this set of features is inarguably what makes the combination so useful. For example, it uses Files on Demand to display your entire OneDrive folder structure and all of its contents on your PC, and that’s true even when you aren’t syncing any of it locally. In this way, you can see all 1 TB of your OneDrive storage (assuming you have a Microsoft 365 account, 7 GB otherwise), and you can arbitrarily mark any folders or files to always be available offline (thus explicitly syncing them locally). But you can also access offline files: Any cloud-hosted file that you open in Windows will download and remain synced with the cloud unless you specify otherwise. It’s great, and this is the behavior I very much rely on for my day-to-day work.

But OneDrive has gotten its tendrils deeper and deeper into Windows 11 over each of its three releases. And some of the integration bits are full-on nanny state behaviors. This is absolutely related to the same desire on Microsoft’s part that led to it requiring Folder Backup by default: If you use this integration fully and store everything in OneDrive, you will need more storage. And you will have to pay for it, and on an annual basis, via a Microsoft 365 account (which provides 1 TB of storage as noted) and/or via OneDrive additional storage plans, which are available in 200 GB, 400 GB, 600 GB, 800 GB, and 1 TB tiers. Microsoft loves its subscription plans.

In each of the three Windows 11 versions so far, Microsoft has provided and evolved the OneDrive integration that appears in File Explorer, most noticeably in the default view, called Home. In 23H2, this Home page offers Quick access, Favorites, and Recent sections right now, and the Quick access section, which contains six of your user account folders—Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos—is replicated in the navigation pane on the left so that you can easily access these locations from any view.

You can customize this, which I discuss in the File Explorer chapter in the Windows 11 Field Guide, but here are some examples.

Unpin folders from Quick access. If you are never going to use, say, the Music folder, right-click it in Quick access (in Home or the navigation pane) and choose “Unpin from Quick access.”

Pin any folder to Quick access. If you do use a folder a lot, you can pin it to Quick access so that it’s always available, in both Home and the navigation pane. To do so, right-click any folder anywhere in File Explorer and choose “Pin to Quick access.”

Microsoft auto-pins folders you use frequently. If you start accessing a folder frequently, Windows will get the hint and auto-pin it to Quick access for you. You may not want this. So you can unpin it as noted above. Or, you can disable this feature entirely. To do so, open the File Explorer Folder Options window by navigating to See more  (“…” in the command bar) > Options > General and deselect “Show frequently used folders.”

Clean up Home. Speaking of that previous item, you may prefer a less busy File Explorer Home view. The “Show recently used files” and “Show files from Office.com” options will determine in part what you see in Home (and in Start, as it turns out). I disable both (along with “Show frequently used folders,” but you should do what makes sense to you.

Make OneDrive your home view. If you like OneDrive so much that you want to see its root folder structure every time you open File Explorer (or open a File Explorer tab), you can do so by opening Folder Options and choosing “OneDrive” (or “OneDrive – Personal”) for “Open File Explorer to:”.

Disable File Explorer suggestions. I haven’t seen one of these for a while—this was a huge problem in the initial version of Windows 11 but it seems to have calmed down since—but File Explorer can display various advertisements—what it calls “suggestions”—mostly to sell you on additional cloud storage and other subscriptions. You can disable this: Open Folder Options, navigate to View, and then locate and uncheck “Show sync provider notifications” in the Advanced settings list.

Disable the Gallery view. In Windows 11 version 23H2, Microsoft has for some reason added a new view called Gallery to the top of the File Explorer navigation pane (between Home and OneDrive) that lets you view your photos (in OneDrive and the local Pictures folder by default) in a more graphical way that’s identical to that in the Photos app. If you don’t want or need this feature, you use the Registry editor to remove it for just your user account or for all user accounts. I can’t completely trust third-party sites, but the downloadable Registry files found here work and appear to be safe.

(Conversely, you may love the Gallery view and want to configure where it looks for photos and other pictures. To do so, select Gallery and then “Collection” > “Manage collection” in the File Explorer command bar.)

Start backup. Also new to 23H2 is a new button that appears to the left of the File Explorer address bar when you have disabled Folder Backup and navigate to one of the three user account folders—again, Desktop, Documents, and Pictures—that Windows 11 really wants you to back up (really, sync) to OneDrive. To my knowledge, you cannot disable these buttons and that drives me nuts. I will keep looking for a way. (Ideally, that “Show sync provider notifications” option would do the trick.)

Microsoft’s folder scheme in OneDrive is the problem

This is the crux of this article, as I’ve discussed the previous issues elsewhere in the past and, in some cases, multiple times. But some recent experiences—Windows 11 23H2 auto-enabling folder backup, of course, but also the positive experience I had with Google Drive as part of my digital decluttering work this year—have inspired me, for lack of a better term, to consider an alternative approach.

To be clear, your user account in Windows 11 has Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders (among others), while your OneDrive cloud storage also has top-level Desktop, Documents, and Pictures (among others). This isn’t coincidental: In Microsoft’s ideal world, you will enable Folder Backup in OneDrive in Windows 11 and will thus sync these folders and their contents. (Or have allowed Microsoft, unwittingly or not, to do so.) This is the master plan.

To date, I have selectively worked within this logical storage scheme. That is, I ignore the OneDrive Desktop folder, but I use the OneDrive Documents and Pictures folders, and I do so extensively: The Documents folder is core to my daily workflow, and Pictures contains my master photos and home videos collections. In fact, this is why I’m so upset about Folder Backup and its creeping enshittification in the first place: I very much do not want OneDrive syncing superfluous crap from the local Documents and Pictures folders on each of my PCs into the same folders in which I store my master document and photo archives, respectively. Seriously, f@#k that. (I also use the top-level Apps, Music, and Videos folders in OneDrive to some degree.)

And here’s what has belatedly occurred to me. It’s so simple that I feel stupid for not simply making this change already.

We don’t have to use those folders. In fact, not using those folders might be the key to accepting OneDrive Folder Backup and not worrying about these issues in the first place.

Think about it. Instead of storing my current and archival documents in the OneDrive Documents folder, as I do now, I could simply move them to a new location in OneDrive. Any location. I could create a new top-level folder structure, outside of and alongside the Desktop/Documents/Pictures trio that Microsoft is getting so squirrely about and move my documents there. And in doing so, I will save myself a lot of pain. It won’t matter too much if the Desktop, Documents, and Pictures auto-sync on any PCs because I won’t even be using them. I will never need to worry about Microsoft stepping on my most precious files.

(I may, however, occasionally need to clean up those folder locations if I need the storage. Not a big deal.)

The Pictures folder is slightly more problematic in that it currently contains the Camera Roll folder alongside my photos and home videos collections. That’s where my phones back up their photos to, and it’s nice having everything in basically the same place. And yet. I can live with that.

And so can you, I bet. Assuming this Folder Backup thing bothers you in the first place.

This semi-obvious revelation was triggered by my recent experiences using Google Drive in Windows. This works much like OneDrive integration, with a Folder on Demand-type system if you desire that (and I do). But because it’s a third-party tool, Google Drive doesn’t directly integrate with the local Desktop, Documents, and Pictures (and Music and Videos) folders like OneDrive does, at least by default. Instead, you can integrate your Google Drive storage with the Windows file system using a virtual drive (G: by default, which is fun) or a virtual folder. Or, you can “back up” your files by choosing arbitrary folders that will sync with Google Drive; if you back up the Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders this way, you will achieve a Google Drive version of OneDrive Folder Backup.

I am using Google Drive now on two PCs to test whether it works “better” than OneDrive. And while it seems to work just as well so far, the key difference is that I’m using the default configuration, what Google calls “file streaming,” via the G: drive. So I never need to worry about Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders on my local PCs. Or them backing up (syncing) to OneDrive.

In Don’t Be a Statistic (Premium) and some of my recent digital decluttering articles, most notably Digital Decluttering: Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned (Premium), I describe the folder structures I use for my day-to-day work and document archives. Because this is relevant to this discussion, however, I will provide a quick overview here and then explain how easy it was to migrate this system to Google Drive. (And to simplify things, I will stick to non-book-related work.)

In Documents (in OneDrive), I have two top-level folders, Archive and Work. The latter is my “current” working folder. It’s everything I’m working on now.

Inside Work, I have a To-do folder and 3 to 6 date-based folders for recent archives (one for this month, 2023-10, a few older ones, and a few for coming months).

The To-do folder is important, and I sync it to every PC I use because I work out of it. It has subfolders for specific topics (reviews, article series, our Eternal Springs YouTube channel, my Hands-On Windows show notes, and Thurrott.com) and then a few dozen in-progress standalone articles. When I publish an article, I move the document file and any ancillary images from To-do into the current date-based archive (2023-10 right now). This declutters the folder, and you can learn about my monthly and quarterly archiving activities in Digital Decluttering: Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned (Premium) if you need to know more about that.

Replicating this folder structure in Google Drive was simple: I just opened the Drive website in a browser and created a top-level Work Folder in My Drive. (I created other folders too, but I’m just sticking to this one topic here.) And then I created To-do and 2023-10 folders inside of that, in effect replicating the most relevant parts of my normal daily-use folders for the purposes of this test.

With this done, I installed Google Drive in Windows and configured it to “stream files” (vs. “mirror files,” which would download and sync the entire contents of Drive to the PC). Then, I opened up File Explorer in two windows, one with OneDrive and one with Google Drive, and copied over the contents of my To-do folder in OneDrive to Google Drive. (There was no need to do this for 2023-10 as it’s just an archive.) And then I marked the Google Drive version of the To-do folder as “Available offline,” which ensures that its contents remained synced with the cloud and available offline.

Per those previously linked articles, I configured the File Explorer navigation bar for my needs. I keep the Desktop, Downloads, and Pictures folders in Quick access because I use them so often. (To be clear, each is local-only, and not synced the cloud.) And then I add the Book, To-do, and current archive (2023-10) folders for easy access. And so for this month’s experiment, I unpinned the OneDrive versions of To-do and 2023-10 from the navigation bar. And then pinned the Google Drive versions in their place.

Simple. And now I am working out of Google Drive and not OneDrive. If I didn’t know I had made this change, I wouldn’t even have noticed it.

But here’s the thing. Instead of switching to Google Drive or some other cloud storage provider, I could simply make my own folder structure in OneDrive for documents (and photos) as noted above. And then I could pin shortcuts to my To-do and 2023-10 (and Book) folders in the navigation pane as before, from wherever they are. This, too, would be seamless and not impact my daily workflow. Which, ultimately, is a big part of this.

I am going to make that OneDrive folder structure change over the weekend after I’ve thought about the top-level folder naming.

Fed up? Use a different cloud storage service with Windows 11

If the enshittification in OneDrive and Windows 11 is getting to you, you can do what I’m doing and experiment with alternatives. I’m starting (and perhaps stopping) with Google Drive because it’s tied to my primary online identity ([email protected], via Google Workspace) and is something I’m paying for regardless. But also because it has worked so well for me so far, and because I’ve had positive experiences with Google Photos.

But as noted, there are other alternatives. Apple iCloud, Box, and Dropbox all offer some degree of Windows file system integration, just like OneDrive and Google Drive. But I suspect Box and Dropbox are a bit more flexible than iCloud from a technical perspective. That said, iCloud is ironically a good value if you don’t paying month to month: Like Google Drive, you can get 2 TB of iCloud+ storage for $9.99 per month (though Google Drive offers annual plans and a resulting savings too). Dropbox Plus also offers 2 TB, but at $11.99 per month or $120 per year. And Box is very expensive: Its Personal Pro plan offers only 100 GB of storage and is $14 per month/$120 per year.

But there is one dark horse alternative that may appeal to the Microsoft enthusiast. You can also get a Microsoft 365 commercial account for as little as $6 per month, and that comes with 1 TB of storage, just like the consumer-oriented Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions. Not surprisingly, there are some advantages and disadvantages to this alternative.

You can find the various commercial and consumer Microsoft 365 accounts on the Microsoft website. Here, I will focus on the commercial plan I use for testing purposes, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, which is $6 per user per month on an annual subscription (so, $72 per year). But if you need the desktop Office apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on—you will need at least a Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription, which is $12.50 per user per month on an annual subscription ($150 per year). And at that price, maybe this isn’t a great idea, given that Microsoft 365 Family gives you 6 TB of total storage across six accounts, which makes for some fun possibilities.

Microsoft 365 Business Basic is what Microsoft calls a Work or School account. It’s designed to be used with a custom domain (which you will need to supply and pay for), and it’s based on what’s now called Entra ID, the former Azure Active Directory (AAD), the commercial alternative to the Microsoft account (MSA). And while this type of thing is specifically designed to be centrally managed, if you will be using it as an individual, it can be as lightly managed as you desire.

This account comes with 1 TB of OneDrive (for Business) storage, which you can use in Windows 11 just as you do (consumer) OneDrive, with the same basic file system integration functionality. But also without some of the nagging: OneDrive for Business does not offer or force you to use Folder Sync as does the consumer client. (OneDrive for Business uses a blue tray icon, compared to gray for the consumer version. And yes, you can use both side-by-side.)

You also get a slightly cleaner Windows 11 experience. It won’t prevent you from seeing crapware, but the Start menu is cleaner, there’s no Search highlights, and Edge is a bit more streamlined.

Out of the box, a Microsoft 365 Business Basic account is not a Microsoft account. But it can be: If you sign in to the web or Windows as an individual instead of using the work or school link, it will be transformed into an (or, really, linked to a new) MSA, sort of giving you the best of both worlds. (You can’t use Outlook.com for email, however, as that will be managed by Outlook for the Web, the commercial service.) You can then sign into apps using the same email address, but will choose between the Work or School account and MSA accounts (personas). (Or just keep using your current MSA.)

All this said, there are good reasons not to do this. The big two have already been mentioned: You don’t get the Office desktop apps and Microsoft 365 is still a better value. Plus, if you do make this account an MSA too, it will always be linked to this account. If you give it up/stop paying for it, you will lose the MSA.

I keep my own Microsoft 365 Business Basic around for testing only, and maybe it’s telling that I’ve never once considered using this to sign into my PCs. I’m just throwing it out there as an option to consider.

Next steps

While I’m not 100 percent sure where I’ll land, I feel good about the two steps I’m taking to ease up the pressures caused by Windows 11 and OneDrive enshittification. I’m going to restructure my OneDrive folder structure so that my most important data is nowhere near the folders that Microsoft wants to back up. And I’m going to keep experimenting with Google Drive, which is working very nicely so far. And then I’ll decide what to do next.

Concurrent with this, I will continue testing 23H2 and write about it here on the site and in a coming set of Windows 11 Field Guide updates. And I’m hoping that some of the bad new behaviors I’ve seen so far are either bugs or will have workarounds soon. Either way, I will let you know what happens.