How to make my Desktop point to PC Desktop instead of OneDrive Desktop?

I had the same problem and your solution did not work:

• One Drive was already disconnected, so the "Sync and Backup" item was greyed-out.
• In Explorer, the Desktop still showed up as being on One Drive even though it was disconnected.
• Files copied to the Desktop from other locations (like WSL2) never appeared on the Desktop because Explorer was showing the OneDrive directory, not the contents of the local machine.

The solution was to open explorer and:

• Navigate to This PC --> Windows (C:) --> Users --> (my name)
• On the directory listing, right-click on Desktop to view the Properties
• Select the Location tab. There, the directory still incorrectly pointed to OneDrive.
• Set the location to C:\Users<yourname>\Desktop
• It will ask if you want to copy files, etc, say Yes.

Might be a good idea to make a backup of everything on you Desktop to and external drive before doing this.

Thanks for your effort to help me. I've done everything you suggested, but when I save things I want to appear on my main desktop and save them to C:\users\USERNAME\Desktop, they still do not show up on my main desktop view (not sure what to call that but what I mean is what you see when you start your computer, where wallpaper would show) as they did when I saved them to C:\users\OneDrive\Desktop, so it's still not doing what I need to happen. Any idea what to do next? Rosemary

Hi Ramesh,

I did all that but now in the file Explorer the Icons "Desktop" or "Documents" etc. fail to show me the real files and instead show a link to the "OneDrive - Desktop" .

I noticed also that this overview window of managed back up changed. In the attached screenshot you can see the unticked folders. (Screenshot)

My problems started with the latest win11 update and the following "let´s finnish setting your pc up"- screens that always decided to completly mess with my OneDrive Settings and upload everything. Luckily it happend on this rather empty laptop.

That this still happens, amazes me and makes me want to throw my three systems, dektop and two laptops at someones head. t I try to sync important stuff like studies and personal data with OneDrive inbetween them while leaving GameSaves in Documents or tb-large Recordings in Videos, etc. on their respective machines.

same issue here. very annoying. idk when Microsoft decided to prioritise onedrive over everything else but they should have asked user's first as it is OUR data.

Visit https://onedrive.live.com/ and login to your Live account. See if the files are there. If they're missing, look inside the Trash folder and recover them immediately.