A reader wants to know how to prevent documents from saving to OneDrive cloud storage.
“I don’t want most of my saved documents in the One Drive cloud. I save them under This PC, then Documents. However, they also are saved to the cloud. How do I stop this from happening?”
It’s a fairly easy fix to stop documents from saving to OneDrive, but I’d think about it first. Documents don’t take up very much space and all and if something were to happen to your computer, your documents would be safe where you could instantly access them from another device. Even if you back up documents to an external drive, keep in mind that in case of a fire, theft, or natural disaster, that external drive is probably going to be lost to you as well.
But if you want to un-sync documents from saving to OneDrive, here’s how:
Open File Explorer and find OneDrive in the left pane. Right-click on it.
Choose Manage OneDrive backup from the menu.
This menu will open listing your backup options.
Click on Stop backup under documents. Windows will attempt to get you to back up your Pictures files, make sure you uncheck that as well.
You’ll get a warning that your documents will only save locally. Confirm by clicking on Stop backup.
Additional questions regarding saving to 1Drive: How accessible to hackers are our docs when saved here? And, what prevents someone (maybe someone working for MS with access to 1 drive) from tampering with our docs? How safe is our personal stuff? Saving to one drive would have saved a lot of time when my pc was hacked recently.
A separate question regarding Drop Box which my camera club uses this to share photos. The terms and conditions, which must be agreed to prior to joining, read as though they will collect any and all information on all my contacts. Would you be able to shed light on why these docs read as if they will gather everything about us and all our contacts? Why such strong language for something so simple? FB does this too, and I have no control.
Once hacked, is there a cascade effect to everyone whose contact info was stolen from me? My neighbor was hacked this week and I’m wondering if there is a connection.
Thank you.
I, too, was wondering about hackers and someone at MS getting into our documents in One Drive.