My God I hate this. My wife will tell me she’s confused and can’t find any of her documents, and lo and behold the Microsoft somehow enabled OneDrive and either replaced everything on the computer with her account, or moved everything from the computer to God knows where.
I uninstall One Drive, and every other Microsoft product that they will let me uninstall, as part of my Windows install process. Then I disable anything else that I can. Microsoft is doing everything it can think of to convince me to finally make the switch to Linux.
Do it. Earlier this year I was exactly at the point you are now, coming from using Microsoft since MS DOS days. I'm glad I did the switch and haven't looked back since. It was far easier than I thought it would be. If you know how to uninstall Microsoft bloat you can easily learn to use Linux.
I'm not sure that all of the tools that I use will run in Linux. I'm using Visual Studio to write Great Cow BASIC. I'll probably give it a try and see what happens. I have several pieces of software that are quite old (AutoCAD 2001, PhotoShop CS4, etc) that I keep around because they aren't the new subscription based everything you produce is ours bullshit. I guess I could run windows in a VM to run those.
I have run Linux on servers and I even have one machine running Linux as a workstation but I'm very confortable in Windows. I've been with Microsoft since the MS-DOS 3 days.
Oh yeah, I remember how it bitched I didn't have enough room because it was trying to clone my fucking documents folder without being asked.
And heaven forbid actually using it. I stored work files on a paid account and it cloned it locally on my laptop nearly killing my 500gb hard drive I the process. Again, unprompted. It's such a garbage system.
I uninstalled this crap the moment I saw it appear in Windows Explorer. I never knew it was that bad. It was the rule back when I was still using Windows. Whatever Windows Update installed without my consent, it got deleted immediately.
When I was setting up my new computer late last year, OneDrive wanted to sync everything in my user folders to OneDrive. No idea why. I knew it'd never fit everything anyway. To get it to stop, I had to create a brand new user account without a Microsoft account attached, move everything over to the new account, and delete the old account.
Now, I only have OneDrive sync my college stuff (homework, projects, notes, PowerPoints, etc.). Nothing else syncs to OneDrive. I backup my PC using a program called Backblaze instead.
Which would be fine if it used some symbolic links with the local pictures, documents, downloads, videos, ECT. But it doesn't! It keeps two unique folders with identical names and makes finding shit impossible.