If you don’t pay careful attention when setting up a new Windows PC, you could find many of your data files suddenly relocated to the cloud. That might be a good thing, or it might be a mess. And, of course, Microsoft is frustratingly unhelpful when it comes to explaining how this feature works.
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Should this happen to you, please follow the one simple rule Douglas Adams set down so many years ago: Don’t panic. Before you do anything, it helps to understand exactly what’s going on.
When you set up a new user account on a Windows PC, Windows creates a set of standard folders for you: Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music, Videos. These “known folders” are stored on your system drive, as part of your user profile (C:\Users\Username), just as they have been in every version of Windows for the past few decades.
Also: How to upgrade your ‘incompatible’ Windows 10 PC to Windows 11
When you sign in with a Microsoft account on Windows 10 or 11, Windows creates one additional folder in your profile, OneDrive, and gives that folder a prominent link in the navigation bar on the left side of File Explorer. After setup is complete, your user profile should look something like this:
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