Remove additional OneDrive account on Mac

Question

I have a personal and a business account on my mac, however I no longer work for that employer.

How can I remove the additional account?  The additional account appears as a second cloud icon in the status bar, and on startup always displays an alert that it cannot connect.

However although it appears the same, it does not have the same context menu as the active account - only the option to Quit, so no Preferences option with an Account tab where this should be available (screenshots below)

I saw a post here where the solution was to edit the Windows registry.  Hopefully this has been fixed in the intervening 4 years in both platforms?

regards,

Paul.

Answer 1

Hi Qing - thank you so much for taking the time to answer.

This does seem like it should work, however I am not game to try it during the work week and would prefer to leave it till the weekend.

I would encourage you to continue working on it if you can however, as users should not have to resort to these sorts of hacks to achieve what is quite a reasonably common user case.  It's quite surprising that this has not been implemented correctly over the many byears that OneDrive has been such an important member of the Office family.

Your instructions seem similar to fixes suggested to others here that go back 4+ years:-

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/remove-onedrive-for-business-account/42d0f6c5-dcde-400b-8e47-2b8712887a91

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/forum/all/cannot-remove-school-onedrive-account/af4cb161-ebd5-46ef-9224-cc516a1e009e

So it would be great if the OneDrive UI was modified to cater for adding and removing multiple accounts under the one OneDrive installation in a more professional manner.

I'll let you know how I get on soon. 

kind regards,

Paul.

Answer 2

Hi Qing,

Yes, Unlink would be good but it is only available in the Preferences for the blue (personal) screen above, and therefore will unlink the account I wish to keep.

The problem is, for the orange screen above, I have no doubt I could Unlink there also if I could login, however as I no longer work with that company, they have revoked my login.  Therefore that instance keeps popping up on startup and complaining it can't login.

This is a design fault in my opinion.  We need to be able to "Unlink" without being logged in, and without registry or other low-level hacks.

Do you think you could add that in to the Mac app any time soon? 

kind regards,

Paul.

Answer 3

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your reply.

On our side, I have done the test on our side, the steps can remove it.

You are welcome to post back after trying it, if it can't help you, you are welcome to post back and I will keep working on this.

Besides, I would like to explain that if we can sign into OneDrive normally, we try the following steps to remove OneDrive account no need to delete the OneDrive files.

1. Right click OneDrive icon.
2. Select More.
3. Click Preferences>select Unlink the account.

I could understand your feeling, you can also feedback it via our uservoice, if there are many people voting this, our related team may develop it.

Thanks for your understanding.

Qing

Answer 4

Hi Paul,

Have you tried my suggestion？Did you need further help?

Regards,

Qing

Answer 5

Hi Paul,

Thanks for posting the question on our forum.

According to your description, I suggest you try the following steps to clear all OneDrive account information, then you can sign into Personal account to sync Personal OneDrive again:

1. Close OneDrive.
2. In Finder, press COMMAND +Shift+g.
3. In the window that opens, enter ~/Library and then click Go.
4. Search OneDrive.
5. Delete all folders and files which names include com.microsoft.OneDrive.
6. When you open OneDrive again, it may let you type account to sync, you can sign into with your personal OneDrive.

If this can’t help you, you are welcome and I will keep working on this.

Regards,

Qing