Windows 10: Onedrive deleted my local files when I removed it, help

Yesterday I was troubleshooting a bunch of stuff on my computer, and it was going fine by the end of it. Then at night I noticed Onedrive was listed in file explorer--I DON'T want Onedrive, I never set it up, I didn't know it was there. I only want my files stored locally. So I hurriedly looked up how to remove Onedrive, "unlinked" from my PC, even though it didn't seem to be connected to any account, deleted the files in the Onedrive folders, which I assumed were duplicates of files I save elsewhere this was the big mistake, and it was 100gb so it did not go to a recycle bin, and uninstalle

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Removed an MSA account from PC, safe to delete local OneDrive files?

Visiting family over the holiday I used an extra computer they had to get some work done and added my Microsoft account to the PC as a user to more easily access OneDrive files. I removed the account when I finished, but it left a local copy of my OneDrive files. Since the account has been removed is it safe to delete the local copy of OneDrive files without having to worry about them syncing back and deleting everything in the cloud?

 

Removed an MSA account from PC, safe to delete local OneDrive files?

Hi Aston. If everything is signed out - browser, user, mail etc then yes it is safe. Unless you see a small green tick (synced). You say

which suggests it is a copy anyway? In this case it'll delete fine.

 

Unable to remove onedrive folder

Did that but still getting the error msg "The action can't be completed because the folder or a file in it is open in another program." when trying to rename the OneDrive folder. Thanks.

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Was finally able to delete the OneDrive folder.

After doing all of the previous suggestions, I was never able to rename the OneDrive folder and kept getting the error message: "The action can't be completed because the folder or a file in it is open in another program."

I decided to just go ahead and try to delete the OneDrive folder without the safety precaution of renaming it first. Here's what happened:

1. I did a shift+delete to delete the OneDrive folder without putting it into Win10's recycle bin.
2. Surprisingly the contents of the OneDrive folder started to be deleted. It took a long time and displayed a progress bar because it was 85GB in size.
3. Toward the end of the deletion process, it said it could not delete a file because it was open in Macrium Reflect. I did not use Macrium during this boot up so Macrium was running in the background due to some auto start on boot. It gave the choice to skip the file so I clicked that and the deletion procedure completed.
4. But the OneDrive folder was still present.
5. I tried to delete it again and got the same message about Macrium.
6. However, when I checked the size of the OneDrive folder, the 85GB was gone and it was only some kilo bytes in size.
7. I went into Task Manager and did an End Task for the 3 Macrium processes that were running.
8. Now I was able to delete the OneDrive folder.

So it appears that "maybe" the reason I could not rename the OneDrive folder "because a file was open in another program" was because of the auto start Macrium Reflect processes. Too bad that Microsoft programmers could not see fit to say which program it was during the rename process, but luckily did say which program it was in the delete process.

EDIT: I just rechecked and the OneDrive folder is still present. Either it appeared to have been deleted or I missed seeing it after step-8 above. But I'll just leave it since it only contains 1.46 MB of data. Though I'll need to check it later to see if it increases in size.

Thanks to the folks who helped and hope this info helps others,