I recently wasted multiple evenings going through this with my partner's photos on both OneDrive and Google. It was a nightmare, trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.

I ended up doing a full backup from the cloud to an external drive and unplugging it just to be sure, then carefully using the awful web interfaces to delete a bunch of photos and videos from the cloud after deactivating all the auto-backup "options", which is apparently the only way to do it without also wiping your local media. There doesn't seem to be any way to do it while using the "service" normally on the device; any attempt to delete from the cloud will also delete your local copy.

People have called me paranoid for seeking out and removing/deactivating these "services" with extreme prejudice on my own devices, but this experience was even worse than I'd imagined.

[–] Midnitte@beehaw.org 3 points 7 hours ago

trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.

...and that's Microsoft's entire game. Get old people to pay more for higher tiers of storage because your mom doesn't understand why she has no storage left for the family picnic photos.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 16 points 17 hours ago

Yeah, such a service, deleting your files!

I ran into a fun one where both google and Xiaomi backed up my photos, that was a nightmare to save and clean out. They would write back deleted files (hey look we restored your list files!) and the other service would back them up again lol.

It's almost as it's not meant to be useful but a trap to fall into eh.