Windows 10: Does a factory reset of Windows delete OneDrive files synced from this boot drive?

I'm doing a factory reset, and I'm storing important files on OneDrive, so I'm just paranoid and want to make sure I'm not losing my files by doing a factory reset. :

:)

 

Reset OneDrive Sync in Windows 10


Due to something I did on the OneDrive settings, I guess, all my OneDrive files have synced to this insider installation, filling up the limited space on the hard drive, before all the OneDrive files had synced. OneDrive shows a warning that it could not proceed, due to lack of space.

I am unsure which files from my hard drive have not been copied to the cloud, (if any), and there is 18GB of files in the cloud, so it would be difficult to be sure if I delete files on my hard drive, that they are not unique copies, and if I delete contents of folders, I may be deleting some things I may need to keep. Or am I worrying unduly?

I reset OneDrive to try to resolve this, and then in OneDrive Settings, Account tab, Choose folders, "Sync your OneDrive files to this PC" unchecking all the boxes, but the OK button is greyed out and unavailable. Do I just have to wait until I can OK this?

I was hoping that this would start removing all synced files from my PC.

Do I have to manually remove several (>10)GB of files from the PC?

I have the same problem on another PC which contains more sensitive documents, so I want to sort this out on the Insider system first.

 

Reset OneDrive Sync in Windows 10


Well, Shawn, I found myself going around in circles. Nothing seemed to stick on the insider machine Build version 16257, so I eventually turned off OneDrive, uninstalled the 2 OneDrive apps on *Start and then tried to delete all the files in the OneDrive folder in my User folder that were taking up ~10GB of disk space, but something was preventing this:





After attending to deleting the folders and files that could be removed I was left with one file, an internet shortcut to OneNote Online:





I removed inheritance and changed permissions on the file so I am the single owner, but I still cannot delete the file, and thus the /OneDrive/Documents folder remains.

Settings/Storage still seems to think that OneDrive is still full, although File Explorer reports the expected free space on the drive. Signing out and on again fixed Settings/Storage, but not the indelible file.

Any ideas how the corrupted metadata can be purged?

 

OneDrive Placeholders are coming back, now called On-Demand Sync




"At Ignite 2016, Microsoft has just announced that it is bringing Placeholders back to OneDrive on Windows 10. Now, they are not called Placeholders anymore — Microsoft is renaming the feature to “On-Demand Sync” which makes a lot more sense than “Placeholders”.

The company demoed this feature at Microsoft Ignite today, and it works just like it used to previously. As you can see in the screenshot above, the files stored in OneDrive weighed in around 9GB, but the actual size on disk was only around 3MB which is really neat. Of course, this feature isn’t anything new as it was available back in the Windows 8 days. However, Microsoft removed the feature with Windows 10, and after lots of waiting, they are finally coming back.

In case you are not familiar with OneDrive Placeholders, it’s a pretty neat feature which lets you see all of your OneDrive files on your computer — but they are not actually downloaded on your PC. When you open them, OneDrive will download the files on-demand, saving your local space which is really useful, especially if you have a PC that doesn’t have a lot of storage.

While Microsoft didn’t announce when exactly On-Demand Sync will be available to OneDrive users, we suspect it will be available with Windows 10 Redstone 2 — which is expected to arrive early next year. "

OneDrive Placeholders are coming back, now called On-Demand Sync