OneDrive confusion

Shortly after installing this Win 10 PC over a year ago I removed/disabled its default OneDrive. I regarded it as redundant as I have a Dropbox Pro account.

Dropbox - OneDrive-Disabled-1.jpg

I've belatedly noticed today that I have about 1,500 files (3 GB) in several hundred largely obscure \OneDrive folders.

I'd appreciate advice on how to decide which, if any, I can delete please. (They are all part of my nightly and weekly backups.)

Or should I just leave them alone, on the grounds that some programs may have been using them and their absence will cause problems? Come to that, won't there be problems anyway, now that I've this morning set the
options I should have set a year ago?

Dropbox - OneDrive-Disabled-2.jpg

Note: I'm wondering if this is related to my post 'Why no CldFlt service?'.


Terry, East Grinstead, UK

slicendice said:

What backup software or method are you using?

We need to solve the backup solution settings first before we know what and if any of the OneDrive folders/files can be deleted safely.

Personally I have nothing going to OneDrive except files I explicitly put there.

Not sure why it's relevant, but the answer is SecondCopy.

slicendice said:

It is relevant as you stated that the files on your OneDrive are backup files, didn't you?

No, they are all included in the extensive backups I make."...my nightly and weekly backups."

Terrypin said:

No, they are all included in the extensive backups I make."...my nightly and weekly backups."

By definition those would be back up files.

slicendice said:

@Terrypin

Maybe I misunderstand...did you mean that you are making backups of the obscure files from OneDrive, not OneDrive containing your backup files?

Yes! I was just saying that I had safe backups of all the OneDrive files. So if I did decide to delete some/all of them, I could always restore them if there were negative consequences.

If this is the case, we need to figure out what those files are, and where they come from. What apps do you have connected to OneDrive? Mobile and PC. This could be a long list of apps to check, so take your time. It would also help if we could get some more detailed information about the folder names, file names and their extensions. This way we might be better able to track down the app that is pushing those files there..

I agree, it looks a difficult task.

But note that there is not a single 'OneDrive' folder to consider, hence my confusion. I assume that all the references I see to 'the OneDrive' folder mean this one:
C:\Users\terry\OneDrive
That contains 577 Files in 196 Folders (400 MB).

But I also have these:
C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive
153 Files, 117 Folders (43 MB)

C:\Users\terry\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive\
380 Files, 134 Folders (155 MB)

TOTAL: 1,111 Files, 451 Folders (598 MB); not 1,500 as estimated earlier, as I double-counted some.

There's also an empty folder.
C:\Users\Administrator\OneDrive
C:\Users\Administrator\OneDrive (empty).

We don't have much information to go with at the moment, so there is no way to tell if those files can be safely deleted or not.

I'm inclined to leave everything alone for a few days and see if any new files get created in any of these folders. If not, with tidiness in mind, I'll probably delete the lot.

Are most here using OneDrive? No one else ever decided to disable it and hence faced similar situation?


--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

I use OneDrive as a regular folder that I drop and drag files there when I want. I have a couple of songs and a few documents and some wallpaper stored there, but I have mine configured to never do anything automatically.