Windows 10: How to stop OneDrive syncing all Desktop items when I have no OneDrive icon in the Taskbar

Hello,I can't stop OneDrive uploading everything I put on my Desktop because at some point OneDrive broke, and there is no OneDrive icon in the Taskbar.I spent days with MS techs who could not fix the problem other than by telling me to reinstall Win 11, which I won't do.All attempts to reinstall OneDrive alone failed during the time I spent with MS techs. It cannot be removed and then reinstalled because of its broken state, so any suggestions along those lines unfortunately will not be possible.All the online fixes I've read that purport to stop OneDrive automatically backing up everything o

:)

 

Windows 10 - OneDrive

Right click on the app and one of the properties has an option to not automatically start it. Uncheck, restart the computer, and it should stop. If you want to go another step further, find the OneDrive app in the start menu, right click on it and uninstall.

If that is still insufficient, there is a batch uninstaller for OneDrive available online. I can copy the code here if you need it.

 

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 - MSPoweruser

 

Windows 10 - OneDrive

W10Privacy utility. Option to permanently stop OneDrive from starting up.