There are a great deal of options available for any consumer or business to back-up important files to the cloud. If you are using Windows 10, there will be automatically Microsoft’s OneDrive installed on that device. But if you prefer another back-up solution (for example: Google’s Drive, or Dropbox), you may want to fully uninstall OneDrive from Windows 10.

By default, OneDrive is present as a Windows program, but OneDrive is also present in the left side of the File Explorer. You may now wonder:

• How to permanently remove OneDrive from Windows 10
• Hide OneDrive link from Explorer in Windows 10
• Prevent OneDrive from starting up with system start

Here are the steps from completely removing OneDrive from your Windows 10 installation, step by step.

Uninstall OneDrive via Control Panel

First step is the easy one: go to Control Panel and search for Microsoft OneDrive. For me, even after selecting ‘Uninstall‘ here, OneDrive would be automatically be reinstalled after each restart of Windows. So this step may not be enough to really get rid of this program, so keep following this article.

Remove from Explorer via Registry Editor

Next up is removing the OneDrive entry from the Explorer window.

Open the Registry Editor by going to Start and typing regedit. From there, browse to the following location:

 HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{018D5C66-4533-4307-9B53-224DE2ED1FE6} 

Double click on System.IsPinnedToNameSpaceTree and set the value to 0 (zero) and click OK.

That’s it. You should now be freed of the OneDrive File Explorer entry in Windows 10 via this ‘registry hack’, and you also completely removed OneDrive.