Question Backing up files from an old PC - from a Microsoft Account

[King_V]

So, there are two old PCs that my girlfriend has. However, she thinks there might still be files on the drives of those machines that she might need.

However, on both of them, she logged in with her Microsoft account. These days, she has much more on OneDrive, but I noticed that, for example, there's files in any given directory, where some are on OneDrive, and some are legitimately only on the local hard drive.

I want to back up those two older systems entirely, but copying the OneDrive files (or maybe they're something akin to links/shortcuts, I don't know how it works) would be pointless.

For mass-copying, is there an easy way to distinguish between files that are actually stored on the PC's SSD, and those that are on OneDrive, so that I don't have to go manually selecting the non-Cloud files?

 

[USAFRet]

I am not aware of any automagic way to do that.

And even if there were, would you trust it?
The 'oops' value exists.

Copy everything from these old drives.
Scroll through manually.
Keep what is needed.

 

[King_V]

And even if there were, would you trust it?
The 'oops' value exists.

An excellent point . . making my decision all but certain to be the "copy everything" route.

 

[USAFRet]

An excellent point . . making my decision all but certain to be the "copy everything" route.

Given 2 drives, locally accessible, a file compare would be possible, easy, and near 100% safe.

But given ancient systems, different user accounts, the possible (or not) existence of OneDrive (or possibly something else cloud related)....all bets are off.