Windows 10: How to stop Windows from treating the OneDrive directory as a separate physical drive?

For some reason Windows treats the OneDrive folder as a separate physical drive, so if you try to move files from the OneDrive folder to another location on the same drive (and these files are un-synced, as I will explain below,) it acts like you need additional free space to hold all those files, even though that's not true. This is causing a large headache for me currently as I need to move a large amount of data out of my OneDrive folder and there is very little free space on the drive.

Background: I've had a kludgy workaround set up for a long time to prevent OneDrive from uploading files from specific folders, since this extremely basic feature (which is needed to prevent certain programs from crashing, and prevent wasting huge amounts of bandwidth and space on my OneDrive account) is something that has never been implemented in OneDrive. The only way I've found to accomplish this is to intentionally set up a sync conflict by placing an empty dummy folder on OneDrive, and then disabling syncing of that folder on my PC (which deletes it,) and then creating the folder again on the PC which registers as a sync conflict. For some reason last night, having chkdsk briefly dismount the drive caused all of my sync conflicts to disappear and OneDrive started attempting to upload 100 GB of data to my account with maybe 1 GB available.

:)

 

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.

 

File Explorer stopped showing the separate folders for OneDrive, Dropbox, and iCloud Drive in the left panel.

Original title: File Explorer

After I upgraded to Win 10 from 8.1, File Explorer stopped showing the separate folders for OneDrive, Dropbox, and iCloud Drive in the left panel with Quick Access and This PC. DropBox and iCloud Drive do show up in Quick Access with pins.

How do I get them all back as individual folders, separate from Quick Access, that I can expand as usual for directories? At this point, I can't get to my OneDrive files and folders.

Thank you,

 

Windows 10 - OneDrive

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