How to Remove Local OneDrive Files Without Deleting Them

OneDrive has some enormous benefits for users. You can access your files from anywhere in the world, sync your documents between all your devices, and save space on your hard drive by keeping your content in the cloud.

It's the last of those three benefits—saving hard drive space—that we want to focus on today. Specifically, we're going to explain,

How to remove local OneDrive files from your PC without deleting them from OneDrive itself.

How to delete files from OneDrive but not your computer.

Keep reading to learn more.

Categorizing OneDrive Files

Files in your OneDrive account fall into one of three categories when viewed through the prism of File Explorer:

Online-Only Files: These files don't take up space on your machine. You can only access them when you have an internet connection. They are marked using a cloud icon.
Locally Available Files: These are former online-only files that you downloaded to your machine. They are shown with a green tick in a white circle.
Always Available Files: These files download onto your computer immediately after creation and are available at all times. They use a white tick in a green circle.

You have two choices if you want to remove OneDrive files from your local computer without deleting them from your cloud storage. It depends on whether you're starting with Always Available Files or Locally Available Files.

How to Make OneDrive Files Locally Available

If you want to make sure that you're always able to access OneDrive files on your local PC, even when you're offline, you need to make sure a local copy is available at all times. Follow these steps to make the necessary tweaks:

Open File Explorer.

Click on OneDrive in the left-hand column.

Navigate to the file or folder in question.

Right-click on the file/folder.

Click on Always keep on this device.

The icon will change to a white tick in a green circle, and the selected files will sync to your PC. It could take a few minutes, depending on the files' size. Once the process is complete, any changes you make to the files on other computers will automatically be reflected in your local copy.

How to Delete Local Copies of OneDrive Files

Perhaps you've finished working on a project, and you're now happy for the old files to live in the cloud, where they won't take up space on your hard drive. Thankfully, it is easy to un-sync OneDrive. In cases where you want to remove OneDrive files from your PC, follow these steps instead:

Open File Explorer.

Click on OneDrive in the left-hand column.

Navigate to the file or folder in question.

Right-click on the file/folder.

Click on Free up space.

The green circle will change back into a cloud icon, OneDrive will delete the local copies of the file/folder, and the space on your hard drive will become free.

How to Delete OneDrive Files Without Removing Them From Your PC

If you have a file/folder in OneDrive that you no longer want to store in the cloud but for which you do want to maintain a local copy on your PC, you'll need to move it out of the OneDrive folder before you delete it.

Open File Explorer.

Click on OneDrive in the left-hand column.

Navigate to the file or folder in question.

Left-click on the file/folder to highlight it.

Press CTRL + C to make a copy.

Navigate to where you want to save the local copy. Remember, make sure you're no longer looking at the OneDrive file hierarchy in the left-hand panel.

Press CTRL + V to paste the file into its new home.

Go back to OneDrive in the left-hand panel of File Explorer and delete the original file.

Don't Forget to Make Backups!

As always, if you are new to this process, it always pays to make backups before you try to make any changes. Backups can be made on another cloud service like Google Drive, on a USB stick, or on an external hard drive.

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