No, you’re thinking about the Microsoft Account login (which still has workarounds but whatever). OneDrive needs to have its own separate login, in case you, like me, have a separate account for work or need to have multiple One Drive accounts or if you have paid One Drive, 365 and whatnot.
So you can absolutely log in to Windows with a MS account and log in to One Drive with your work account… or not log in at all and just not have it running, which is what I do.
I have installed Win11 on a new computer build this year. I promise I’m looking at my system tray and there is zero One Drive icons on it. No One Drive folder in my Windows file explorer, either.
Well I’ve never purposely logged into One Drive but my “Documents” and “Pictures” folders’ paths have been inside of an One Drive folder every time since at least win10.
The last time I installed win11 one of the very first things I did was move all the default libraries out of one drive.
I literally just navigated to my documents folder in a explorer window and copy pasted the path here. I swear I’m not making this up.
I’m pretty sure that these days syncing your documents folder with OneDrive is two separate opt-ins: one to log in to OneDrive at all and one to select whether to sync your libraries.
I am not going to set up a VM just to check this, but I have multiple Windows machines in operation on Win10 and Win11 at home right now and none of them are syncing my libraries. That ranges from five year old Win10 installs to Win11 installs as recent as a couple of months ago.
For the record, I don’t think you’re crazy either. There’s definitely something baked into the install we’re doing differently or some version difference or whatever. It’s surprisingly hard to suss this out at this point, since there’s a fairly complex set of could-backed choices, first time setup choices and maybe even regional changes, I’m not sure. The one interesting, kinda shocking takeaway is how differently our machines can be set up based on probably some checkmark we each set up differently once ages ago or whatever the hell this is.
The login is now unskippable and part of the OS setup.
No, you’re thinking about the Microsoft Account login (which still has workarounds but whatever). OneDrive needs to have its own separate login, in case you, like me, have a separate account for work or need to have multiple One Drive accounts or if you have paid One Drive, 365 and whatnot.
So you can absolutely log in to Windows with a MS account and log in to One Drive with your work account… or not log in at all and just not have it running, which is what I do.
I have installed Win11 on a new computer build this year. I promise I’m looking at my system tray and there is zero One Drive icons on it. No One Drive folder in my Windows file explorer, either.
Well I’ve never purposely logged into One Drive but my “Documents” and “Pictures” folders’ paths have been inside of an One Drive folder every time since at least win10.
The last time I installed win11 one of the very first things I did was move all the default libraries out of one drive.
I really doubt you do not have a OneDrive folder at all, since the default My Documents location is
C:\users\<user>\OneDrive\MyDocumentsRegardless. Even if you completely skip the OneDrive shit at install.
Sorry, but no. My current path is
C:\Users\<user>\DocumentsI literally just navigated to my documents folder in a explorer window and copy pasted the path here. I swear I’m not making this up.
I’m pretty sure that these days syncing your documents folder with OneDrive is two separate opt-ins: one to log in to OneDrive at all and one to select whether to sync your libraries.
I am not going to set up a VM just to check this, but I have multiple Windows machines in operation on Win10 and Win11 at home right now and none of them are syncing my libraries. That ranges from five year old Win10 installs to Win11 installs as recent as a couple of months ago.
For the record, I don’t think you’re crazy either. There’s definitely something baked into the install we’re doing differently or some version difference or whatever. It’s surprisingly hard to suss this out at this point, since there’s a fairly complex set of could-backed choices, first time setup choices and maybe even regional changes, I’m not sure. The one interesting, kinda shocking takeaway is how differently our machines can be set up based on probably some checkmark we each set up differently once ages ago or whatever the hell this is.
During setup before answering any pointless questions by microsoft press press Shift + F10 and type
Start ms-cxh:localonly
Enjoy your offline account.
I’ve already given up on windows by now, but I’ve heard that trick no longer works.