OneDrive Disable
Microsoft OneDrive is a great cloud storage service with many free and paid storage options. It easily integrates with Microsoft Windows and syncs all your documents, photos and videos automatically. However, this doesn’t mean that every Windows user wants OneDrive integrated into Windows.
May be you are already a loyal user of another cloud storage service like, Dropbox or Google Drive and want to stick to it. You may also want to avoid file syncs if you Internet connection isn’t very fast in general. Whatever the reason is, we are here to help you disable the OneDrive integration in Windows 10, 8, 7 and older versions as well.
Disable OneDrive in Windows 10
Windows 10 includes OneDrive, and Microsoft’s official party line is that you can’t disable it. That’s not true — there are several ways to disable OneDrive and remove it from File Explorer on Windows 10.
Microsoft provides a group policy setting that can disable OneDrive on Professional editions of Windows 10. Windows 10 Home users can use the below registry hack to get rid of OneDrive instead.
Windows 10 Home
This method is ideal for users of Windows 10 Home who want to get rid of OneDrive without stripping it completely out of the operating system. It’s completely reversible if you ever want to use OneDrive again.
To do this, first right-click the OneDrive icon in your notification area — it looks like a little white cloud — and select Settings. You might have to click the up arrow button to view all the system tray icons before you see the OneDrive icon.
Uncheck the “Start OneDrive automatically when I sign in to Windows” option and save your settings. OneDrive won’t load at startup anymore.
If you don’t plan on using OneDrive, you may also want to click or tap the “Unlink OneDrive” button here. This will stop OneDrive from syncing until you set it up again. It’ll be grayed out if you haven’t yet set up OneDrive.
You now just need to remove that “OneDrive” option located in the navigation pane of the FIle Explorer window. This requires a quick registry hack. Download this Remove OneDrive From File Explorer registry hack. Open the .zip file and double-click the appropriate .reg file for for your version of Windows, depending on whether you have a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows 10. We’ve also included a .reg file that will restore the OneDrive entry if you ever decide you want it back.
To check whether you’re using a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows 10, open the Start menu and launch the Settings app. Navigate to System > About. Look at “System type” and see whether it says you’re using a “64-bit operating system” or “32-bit operating system.” OneDrive should vanish from File Explorer immediately after you add the information in the .reg file to your registry. If it doesn’t, try rebooting your PC and re-opening File Explorer.
You could also do this by hand, of course. The above .reg files modify the System.IsPinnedToNameSpaceTree DWORD value under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{018D5C66-4533-4307-9B53-224DE2ED1FE6}\ to 0, from its default of 1. On 64-bit editions of Windows, it also changes the System.IsPinnedToNameSpaceTree DWORD value under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{018D5C66-4533-4307-9B53-224DE2ED1FE6\. To undo the change, set the same settings back to the original value of 1.
If any local copies of your OneDrive files have synced to your PC, you may want to delete them to free up space. Navigate to the C:\Users\NAME\OneDrive folder, which contains your user’s downloaded OneDrive files. These won’t be automatically deleted when you unlink your account and stop syncing. Deleting them won’t delete them from OneDrive if your account is unlinked from OneDrive — they’ll just be deleted from your local device.
Windows 10 Professional, Enterprise, and Education
Professional, Enterprise, and Education editions of Windows 10 get access to the Group Policy Editor. This utility provides an advanced option that allows you to disable OneDrive system-wide, but Windows 10 Home users can’t use this.
To do this, press the Windows key to open the Start menu’s search box, type gpedit.msc into it, and press Enter to open the Group Policy Editor. Navigate to the following folder:
Local Computer Policy\Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\OneDrive
Double-click the “Prevent the usage of OneDrive for file storage” policy setting in the right pane, set it to “Enabled,” and click “OK.”
This completely disables access to OneDrive. OneDrive will be hidden from File Explorer and users won’t be allowed to launch it. You won’t be able to access OneDrive at all, not even from within Windows Store apps or use the camera roll upload feature. To undo this change, just head back to here and change the policy to “Not Configured” instead of “Enabled.”
There doesn’t seem to be an associated registry setting you can modify to get the same effect as the group policy setting on Windows 10. The “DisableFileSync” and “DisableFileSyncNGSC” registry settings that worked on Windows 8.1 no longer works on Windows 10.
Disable OneDrive in Windows 8
Microsoft has integrated OneDrive as one of the built-in features of Windows 8 (and above). You cannot “delete” this feature anymore, but you can disable it to prevent any syncing. The best way to get OneDrive out is to unlink your Microsoft account from the OneDrive program. The process for unlinking is same as in Windows 7 and below.
You can just go to OneDrive settings from system tray and click on “Unlink OneDrive” button to unlink it. Now, you can’t delete OneDrive from your PC, but you can still get rid of it from the File Explorer “Quick Access” menu using a registry hack.
For this purpose, you will have to tweak Windows registry, which may damage the system if something goes. So it is recommended that you first backup the registry and then follow any of the guidelines. Press Windows+R key to open “Run” dialog. Here, type “regedit” and click on “OK” to open the Windows registry. In the registry, you will have to navigate to the following location:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT >>> CLSID >>> {018D5C66-4533-4307-9B53-224DE2ED1FE6}
We understand that It can be quite confusing to reach the above path, but you will have to do it. Just keep in mind that you will have double-click on each folder to open all the folders under it. Following the starting alphabets and numbers may also help in reaching the directory easily.
When you will reach this directory, double-click on “System.IsPinnedToNameSpaceTree” located in the right panel. From the next dialog, change the value for 1 to 0 and click on “OK”.
This will hide OneDrive from the File Explorer. If you want it back, just go through the same process and change the value from 0 to 1.
Disable OneDrive in Windows 7 and older
OneDrive is not an integrated feature of Windows 7 and older versions so it is not a problem to disable/delete it. If somehow you installed OneDrive, then you can easily stop it from syncing data or even completely uninstall it it like any other program.
For continuous syncing, OneDrive works in the Windows system tray. So you can easily disable it right from the system tray. Right click on the OneDrive icon in the system tray and from the menu, click on “Settings”.
Now under “settings” tab, click on “Unlink OneDrive” button and your account will unlink. This will only disable auto sync, the sync folder will still be part of your system and any data added there will be synced.
You can also completely delete OneDrive from your Windows 7 (and older) just like you delete any other program. From the start menu, click on “Control panel” and then click on “Uninstall a program”. just select the OneDrive application and uninstall it permanently.
What About Uninstalling OneDrive from Windows 10?
There’s another tip going around — a method that uses the OneDrive installer lying in the Windows system folder to uninstall OneDrive from your system. We don’t recommend this option for several reasons. We aren’t sure how to get OneDrive back if you uninstall it like this, short of resetting your Windows 10 PC to its default state. Windows 10 could potentially run the built-in installer again to reenable OneDrive after an update in the future, but the tweaks above will disable it more cleanly.
If you’re really convinced you want to strip OneDrive out of your system — rather than just disabling it cleanly with the above methods — you can open a Command Prompt window as administrator and run the following command to ensure OneDrive isn’t running:
taskkill /f /im OneDrive.exe
After you do, run the following command to uninstall OneDrive on a 64-bit edition of Windows 10:
%SystemRoot%\System32\OneDriveSetup.exe /uninstall
Or, run the following command to uninstall OneDrive on a 32-bit edition of Windows 10:
%SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\OneDriveSetup.exe /uninstall
You’re free to install your preferred cloud storage service — Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, Box, Amazon Cloud Drive, or whatever else — and use it instead of OneDrive. The above tricks get OneDrive out of the way so it won’t keep popping up.