Windows 10: All files including whole desktop folder is backed up by onedrive, how do I undo this?

Well, I'm posting for a friend. His brother or someone seemed to have backed up/synced ALL his files with onedrive. Every single file on his pc is now backed up/syned by it once again even the whole desktop and most files have an small red 'x' icon next to them. He would like to undo all of this, he does not want anything backed up by onedrive. What would be the best course of action? I thought about having him uninstall one drive, though I'm afraid he will lose his files.

:)

 

Backing Up OneDrive Folder with File History

I am backing two computers - a desktop and a laptop, both running Windows 10 - to an external hard drive via File History. On each computer, the majority of our files are in a OneDrive folder, so I have included OneDrive on the list of folders to back
up. On the desktop, all subfolders in the OneDrive folder back up just fine (Erika's Pictures, Erika's Music, Erika's Documents). On the laptop, Peter's Music and Peter's Documents back up, but Peter's Pictures does not. To get it to back up, I have to manually,
separately, add it to the list of folders that File History includes. Obviously, this is easy enough to do, but I don't understand why it is happening or how to fix it. Any ideas? Thank you.

 

File History not backing up OneDrive Documents folder (but correctly backing up other OneDrive folders)

I have my Documents folder and all my photos located in my OneDrive, so that they are always backed up to the cloud. I have previously successfully also used File History to back up all my user files and
libraries (including the OneDrive folder) to a local external drive and it has worked fine for many years. However, recently I noticed that there is something strange happening with the Documents subfolder in the OneDrive folder of the File History backup
when I went to restore a previous version of a file in OneDrive\Documents and the 'Restore personal files' view showed
only a small number of files and folders, not the whole of the current contents of the OneDrive\Documents folder. Moreover, instead of the most recent automatic backup date showing (effectively) the current state of the OneDrive\Documents folder,
it only showed files that had been modified since the previous automatic backup date. If I manually went backwards in time through the backups, I could see other files in my OneDrive\Documents folder that had been modified previously and were still currently
in that folder, but for some reason were not showing in the 'Restore personal files' view of the most recent backup.

I thought something must have gotten out of sync with the File History database, so I stopped the file history service, deleted the
%UserProfile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\FileHistory folder, deleted the File History backup folder from the external drive and then rebooted the PC. As expected after rebooting and going into Control Panel -> File History it showed that
File History was off and there was no File History drive set. I then created a new File History backup to the external drive and checked that there were no 'excluded folders' set. Absolutely everything else got backed up correctly in the new backup, except
for just the OneDrive\Documents folder, which wasn't created at all in the new backup. For example, my OneDrive\Pictures folder backup correctly had all 22.3GB of data comprising 13,067 files and 255 folders, exactly as expected.

I then modified a test file in my OneDrive\Documents folder, clicked on 'Run Now' in File History and then checked the backup. There was now a Documents folder showing in the OneDrive folder, but it contained
just that one test file I had modified.

I tried the suggestion I had seen in a previous discussion thread about this problem of manually adding the full OneDrive\Documents path to the list of backed up folders. It was already there in the list,
but I tried adding it anyway. It made no difference and the folder is still not being backed up.

Why isn't File History backing up all of the folders in OneDrive and selectively refusing to back up just the Documents folder?

 

Desktop folder in OneDrive

When you turn on Desktop
Folder Protection your Desktop folder moves into your OneDrive which backs it up and syncs it to your other devices. You can turn off Desktop protection in the OneDrive Settings at the
Auto Save tab > Update Folders but you will then have to manually move your files back to the Desktop folder in your User's folder. I would leave the Desktop folders alone but just move the files.