Onedrive - massive data consumption

[gregganthonyca]

I just purchased a 2022 Dell XPS 17 laptop.  I found out the hard way that this sucker runs Windows Onedrive which for some is great but, for me it is a nightmare.  I run my data through a hotspot on my phone.  With only 40GB this sucker ran through that data in 3 days.  Turns out everything I was putting on the "C" Drive/Desktop it was putting up on the cloud.  Which if I want to access it it needs to download it from the cloud, which seems like a huge waste of my time.  And this thing has 1TB HD.  Soon to have another 4TB HD's intalled. 

I tried uninstalling it twice through CC Cleaner, but both times it reinstalled - not sure how. Sooooo, the only ways I could figure out how to get it to stop loading my data to the cloud was to one disable it from autostarting via the task manager and the other way was to add a partition to the "C" drive effectively creating another drive and putting all my desktop items on there and then putting a shortcut onto the desktop itself.  

So, my question is, how in the hell do you actually permanently remove ONEDRIVE???

Thanks.

Gregg

[B_Ran69]

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-or-uninstall-onedrive-f32a17ce-3336-40fe-9c38-6efb09f944b0

[KendraD]

Ah, OneDrive chewing through your data? Yeah, that can be a real issue, especially if you’re on a limited plan or have a lot of large files syncing in the background. OneDrive is great for keeping everything backed up and accessible across devices, but sometimes it gets a little overzealous with its syncing. If you’ve got it set to sync automatically, it might be uploading or downloading a lot more than you expect, especially if you’re working with large files like videos, photos, or even big batches of documents.

One thing that can happen is if you’re using it across multiple devices, every time you add, modify, or even move a file, OneDrive is like, “Oh hey, I gotta sync that!” and it starts chugging away in the background. If you have it set to sync everything automatically, that can lead to some serious data usage.

A quick way to get a handle on it is to check your OneDrive settings. You can actually pause the syncing temporarily if you’re on a mobile network or just don’t want it to burn through your data at the moment. You can also choose which folders you want to sync. If you’ve got a lot of unnecessary stuff like high-resolution images or large files, deselect those and let OneDrive focus on the essentials. And if you’re syncing across different devices, make sure those aren’t set to sync when you’re on mobile data.

It's definitely something that can creep up on you if you’re not paying attention, but with a little tweaking in the settings, you should be able to rein it in.