[SOLVED] OneDrive backup - accidently created copy of everything, how to delete ?

[ShangWang]

Hi all,

So I was checking OneDrive and noticed a "backup" option, I was curious as to what it was since I already have my files synced to one drive.
What ended up happening was it literally made a copy of every single file I had and now it's just taking up unnecessary space.

Is there a way to reverse the copies and delete them ?

 

[Colif]

Seems most of the ways are to use some program to do it.

I moved my one drive folder location wrong and now my desktop has a duplicate of almost every file on it, so i get your pain. I just hide desktop icons and ignore it, I have too much storage space to care to fix it. Next clean install will fix it.

careful what you change - https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2273744-one-drive-don-t-make-this-mistake

 

[Deleted member 14196]

I would open up windows explorer, then go to your OneDrive folder, then sort by date so that the latest are up at the top and then you can just grab all the files that are duplicates and delete them

 

[Colif]

Turning on backup does more than just the duplication, he might want to look at my link and check the other changes also didn't happen. I already had most of my library folders on Onedrive as I have a 1tb upload limit with them due to an office subscription. It sure makes reinstalling win 10 easy

 

[ShangWang]

Turning on backup does more than just the duplication, he might want to look at my link and check the other changes also didn't happen. I already had most of my library folders on Onedrive as I have a 1tb upload limit with them due to an office subscription. It sure makes reinstalling win 10 easy

What seemed to work for me is going into onedrive and searching -copy in indexing, then I just ctrl + a and delete all the files in there, no program files or windows files are saved there so it was safe to delete.

Then I just got rid of all the duplicate desktop icons, done!

I didn't get the weird case in the thread you posted, no cache thing or whatever, all my files are still accessible without onedrive it's just "synced" as before. I think Microsoft might have changed the setting over the years or I didn't have the cloud save enabled so I'm good.