Disable OneDrive Group Policy: Turning It Off Across Your Org

Disabling OneDrive in Your Environment Using Group Policy

If you want to stop OneDrive syncing across your organisation — whether because you’re standardising on a different cloud storage platform or you simply don’t want it available — Group Policy gives you a clean, centrally managed way to do this without having to touch each machine individually. Open the Group Policy Management Console, edit (or create) a policy scoped to the computers you want affected, and browse to:

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > OneDrive

In that folder, open “Prevent the usage of OneDrive for file storage” and set it to Enabled. This stops OneDrive from being used as a file storage location on the machine — users won’t be able to start a new sync, and the OneDrive UI will indicate it’s disabled by policy. If the OneDrive administrative templates aren’t showing up in your Group Policy editor, add the OneDrive ADMX/ADML template files to your Central Store (or local PolicyDefinitions folder) first — they don’t ship by default in older versions of the Group Policy management tools and need to be downloaded and added separately. Once the policy applies, run gpupdate /force on a test machine and confirm OneDrive reports itself as disabled before rolling the policy out more broadly.

Screenshot: The OneDrive Group Policy Setting

Still the Right Setting on Current Windows (Updated for 2026)

The Group Policy path and setting name here (Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > OneDrive > “Prevent the usage of OneDrive for file storage”, registry value DisableFileSyncNGSC) remain unchanged on current Windows 11 (24H2/25H2) OneDrive ADMX templates — nothing here has been renamed or deprecated. If you’re managing a cloud-only or Intune-managed fleet rather than traditional on-prem Group Policy, there’s now also a Policy CSP equivalent (OneDriveNGSC/DisableFileSyncNGSC) you can push the same way — that’s an additional option for MDM-managed devices, not a replacement for the GPO method described above.