To be honest, I think for a college kid having that extra copy in the cloud would be 100% a good thing. Why would you not want him to have a duplicate copy of all of his school work? I mean sure he can backup on a regular cadence to an external drive. But what if he hasn't backed up in say 3 days because he was busy or forgot and then his hard drive crashed. Well, then his work for the past three days would be lost. If on the other hand his work was on the surface pro and also synced to the cloud in real time....he would lose none of his files . Or let's say he had his surface pro and his external drive in a backpack together and somebody stole the back pack...you just lose both copies of the data. If one of those copies was in onedeive, this wouldn't be an issue. Let's say your son has a paper due at midnight, but he forgot to turn it in. He went to a friend's house and at 11:00 he remembers, omg I forgot to turn in my assignment. Well, as long as he has access to any device with a web browser he can access the file from the cloud and submit it to the class without physically having access to his computer.
I personally think you telling him to flat out uninstall it and don't use it, would be a real disservice to the kid. IMHO, terrible advice.
When I was going to school for my Computer Information Systems degree, that's when I really found out how valuable OneDrive was. Having a laptop in the class worked wonders where I would take notes and/or do my class projects and drop the info in OneDrive. When I got home, and worked from my desktop, those files would be in the OneDrive folder there. Never even needed to touch the laptop.
If I needed to correct something or do a project, I'd do it from the desktop, and when I went to class the next day with my laptop, the files, corrections, and projects would be there. That's when I knew how valuable OneDrive was.
Today, I don't even need a phone with lots of storage space because I can simply access stuff from the OneDrive app on the phone, instead of having the files locally stored. Yeah, I have certain critical info stored on the phone, but for the most part, I access data via cloud services.
Speaking of saving storage space, as a side note, I've ripped my entire CD collection (2800 CDs) to my cloud-based NAS, and thus I can simply access my music library from my phone via Plexamp which gets the files from my cloud-based NAS (WD PR4100). None of my music files are stored on my phone... and thus no storage space is used there. As long as I have internet/phone service I can listen to my music. I've taken 7-hour trips listening to my collection and never lost connection.
Point here is cloud storage can save tons of space on local devices by having the files stored in the cloud instead of a local device. And yes, those files are also backed up locally.
Anyway, I know many fear the Cloud (and thus the majority of hate for OneDrive), but in today's world, it really does have benefits. And like everything else in the world, there is choice - here choice of what you store in the cloud.
Also, many may not know, but OneDrive also has a Vault folder inside the OneDrive folder - this is a secure password protected folder
you setup for sensitive information you might wish to store in OneDrive but want a little more security. And though the folder is in OneDrive, you will still have to provide a pin to access it - In other words simply signing into OneDrive does not grant access to the Vault folder.
Will this put the fear mongers and conspiracy theorists at ease... probably not; but for the rational, perhaps.
My two cents.
techcommunity.microsoft.com
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