You don’t want to know the mess I just got in with my documents on my laptop. It’s newish Windows 10 and I had thought it would be just like the previous Windows’. However, this thing called Onedrive, Microsoft’s cloud, seems to be getting in the way.

I finally got tired of its keep asking me to upgrade storage on OneDrive and tried to de-activate and remove stuff that was stored on Onedrive. Seems like I didn’t know what I was doing. Microsoft was actually keeping my documents on Onedrive, so in the end I’d actually deleted documents, and the backups I thought I was taking hadn’t covered these files. And the Microsoft restore from recycle bin didn’t seem to work, probably because I’d told it to stop putting this stuff on Onedrive.

The thing is, it seems designed to be confusing. On File Explorer I can find three folders of ‘documents’

• one is under ‘Onedrive’, which is fair enough
• one is under ‘my PC’, which appears to also be the Onedrive folder – this is just confusing
• one is under ‘Libraries/documents’, which is where it used to be, and where I expected it to remain.

I can only conclude that Microsoft is being deliberately confusing. Perhaps if people get confused enough they will give up and buy extra Onedrive storage. The controls for Onedrive do not encourage any other approach.

If you get a new Windows 10 PC, do be careful.

You might find this article useful how-to-stop-windows-10-from-saving-files-to-onedrive.