When Windows users suddenly discover that their files have vanished from their desktops after interacting with OneDrive, the issue often stems from how Microsoft’s cloud service integrates with the operating system. The automatic, near-invisible shift to cloud-based storage has triggered strong reactions from users who find the feature unintuitive and, in some cases, destructive to their local files.
Years ago Microsoft had its OneNote Notebooks as proper files, you could move and copy them and such. Now it’s nearly impossible to get your hands on a “tangible” file using this software.
During that transition- from usable to shit, I made the mistake of uploading my notebook, with all of my uears of course studies (college, professional certifications, etc) into onedrive. That way it could be backed up! A year later I moved my files again into a different system, moving away from OD. They were MY files after all.
What I didn’t know was that Microsoft had moved my Notebook somewhere else into their cloud, on my behalf, and changed my Notebook file to a shortcut/pointer object. There was no indication it was a shortcut as with other documents (the little arrow) on windows. It looked just exactly like the original file.
Well when I tried to open this “file” I got the rudest awakening: Microsoft couldn’t find the “linked” notebook. “What fucking linked notebook?” Apparently, when I moved my “file” (shortcut) out of overdrive, they saw that as a deletion and DELETED the now referenced file they helpfully moved for me.
All of this without ever a single notification; Microsoft deleted years of critical notes with no recourse for recovery. It was just gone.
Ass holes.
Shit! I’m soon to go Linux and now there’s one more thing for me ro figure out then. I have some stuff (not a lot, but some important stuff) on OneNote, lucky me that I made the switch to Obsidian a couple of years ago.
+1 for Obsidian. Copy-paste to other pc = immediate access without setup. Plug & play. Also free.
I use git to sync my md notes instead of obsidians paid sync service also. I’ll never go back to proprietary non-text based notes files.
If you do ever end up in that situation again, (or someone else is,) you can download the notebook by moving it into a folder in OneDrive. Then go to the web and use the option to download the folder. That will zip up the folder, with the real one drive files inside.
You’ll still need to find an app to import them into your new note taker though.
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Linux welcomes all refugees
I moved one old laptop to Linux over about a year ago, and committed to an effort to actually make it do the things I wanted to do, like play games, and run Windows-only tools or find viable replacements. To say it went well is an understatement. Within a few months I had switched every computer I owned, and I’m never looking back again.
Granted, I was already quite familiar with Linux on the server side. This was not my first attempt to use Linux on the desktop, either. But it was my last, because I’m never going back to Windows ever again now.
Valve made a big move when they started their Proton project. That was a key compatibility layer for a more wide-spread adoption.
It was shocking at how fast it went from ‘you can tweak it to run most things’ to ‘I don’t even check to see if the game works anymore before I buy it’.
Yup this was me back in early October saving an old box I wanted to keep around as a media server.
Before the month’s end all my computers are on one Linux distro or another.
Happened to me at work where they force us to use Windows 11. I had turned on the autosave feature on a Word document I was working on. Little did I know this meant it stopped saving the changes locally and started saving them on a OneDrive copy. I then worked all day on that file.
The next day I notice the file on OD, find it odd that it is there so I delete it because I want nothing to do with OD. I then open the local word file and realize that none of the work I did the day prior was saved.
I figured out what happened and fortunately the file was still in the recycle bin. But fuck that whole system to begin with. It won’t even let me use the autosave feature locally.
I have similar issue with Google.
At some point I used to use Google Photos backups. I wanted to delete the backed up files, but there’s no way to do that. It would also delete them from the devices.
And I guess it checks them based on hash, because even in the main view it always figures out where the files are currently stored, if on device, even after I moved them elsewhere. Otherwise these other images only show up in their respective folders, not the main view.I had trouble like this too, so what I’ve done is just give up on using Google photos in any meaningful way.
I still sync to it as a temporary backup, but I periodically copy all media from my device to my local home storage as the true copy.
I have yet to implement a proper open-source alternative for photo organization, but hopefully that’ll be one of the projects completed this year.
One of the problems I was having was that I wanted to take photos that I did not want to sync to Google photos, and yeah just deleting them from Google photos would delete them from my device as well. to get around this, you can force quit the application on your phone, work with the photos however you want, and then restart the application. as long as the photos aren’t in a location you have set to sync to Google photos, it should be fine. also sorry to my coworker who had to see a whole row of photos of my dogs disgusting butthole with a ruptured anal gland before I figured that out.
Go beat your IT department with hammers. I have roughly a decade in IT with primarily Windows in our environment. There’s no reason for it to suck so bad in a corporate environment. They can disable it entirely very easily, or make it work amazingly well with some effort.
My workplace:
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We redirect/sync My Documents and My Pictures to OneDrive seamlessly. If it’s saved in either of those, autosave is on and it’s the same file locally and on onedrive. Files saved follow to any machine. Viewable in explorer always, actually downloaded locally on the fly as needed. Obvious overlaid icon on every file to indicate if it’s synced, syncing, or not available locally (when you’re offline and can’t connect to one drive). You can right click files and folders to easily adjust if they’re always downloaded up to date locally or just on demand.
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If there are any conflicts it can’t auto-merge (usually only non-office docs) it saves them with the source computer name appended to the end of the file name so you have each version available, and it pops up a notification that stays until it is manually dismissed, so you know it happened.
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If for some reason you’re working on a document outside of the synced folders, office programs do not default to saving in one drive, they default to where the document was opened from or to “My Documents” for new docs, so shit doesn’t get silently moved on you. I can and have had the same doc opened on multiple machines at once, made edits on each, and it worked just like live collaboration with other users.
It doesn’t have to suck, and it’s also easily disableable entirely in enterprise environments if your IT doesn’t want to configure it well. We kept it entirely disabled from our environment until we had our config planned and thoroughly tested with a pilot group for a few months before we let it hit the company as a whole.
I work for a huge organization and my local IT guys have their hands bound. I couldn’t even make a ripple in that ocean even if I tried.
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OneDrive is the most aggressively stupid and evil file sync service I’ve ever used. Constantly upselling, actively re-enabling terrible defaults to maximize storage and bandwidth used, terrible at sync resolution when used with multiple systems, and punitive data loss when you try to disable excessive backups.
It’s one of the main reasons I stopped using Windows at home outside a VM.
I have a personal vendetta against OneDrive because it literally holds your files hostage. It uploads your data without your consent and then threatens to cut off access to your own files unless you pay up. It actively fights you when you try to regain control, up to and including reinstalling itself once you finally manage to uninstall it.
It’s the main reason I finally got serious about switching to Linux (which I have and it has been amazing)
I’m still mad though, fuck Microsoft. Evil assholes.
They are so lucky microslop auto installs the Windows Backup app … oh wait …
Years ago I tried to use the WIndows backup app to back up my system disk to a tape streamer. (Magnetic tapes were and still are useful as long term backup.) Result was a backup you coulndn’t recover. I don’t know what exactly was on the tape but it couldn’t be read back. Tried the same with a harddisk, same result. I’ve since then used various external backup tools that had no problem creating backups that you actually can recover from, never looked back at MS backup. You just can’t trust Microsoft to store any important data. You can only be sure they’ll fuck up sooner or later and take things in you own hands.
The problem is most users are unaware their files were being stored on the cloud in the first place. I had a friend who kept downloading mods on his computer only to have them not show up if he was offline. Turns out it was stored on their servers and not locally. All due to Microsoft making sure they stay as little transparent as possible and not warn users that their files are automatically being stored to onedrive.
We need heavy regulation against these sociopaths before it’s too late. This is only going to get worse.
Someone hacked the government
This code is similar to the progress bar. When it reaches 100% do nothing for a while to keep people guessing.
Progress bar have to show random timing. It’s more complezzxx
It’s infuriating. They silently move all your files to their cloud and you don’t notice. Then one day they tell you that you have filled your cloud quota and they want more money. Switching to local only is, by design, a huge pain that tends to go wrong.
Why handle files? Let big bro Microsoft handle them for you.
Its because they are using it.
Seeing all the horror stories in here makes me glad that I recoiled in horror the first time MS offered the idea of me putting my files on their computers instead of mine.
On the other hand, a lot of people are learning how important a tested backup strategy is.
…and don’t forget re-testing your backups regularily. I had a really good backup strategy on my Loonix machine. Automatic (or it won’t be done), tested, fool proof. When I somehow crashed a somewhat complex encrypted LVM array while swapping HDDs against SSDs, I had to recover from backup. Unfortunately I had become a better fool than I was when I set up backup4l. I had changed the compression algo, made a tiny mistate in the config and failed to realize that for six months I had been storing empty backups every day. Outch.
Notifications will go a long way toward helping with that. Check all assumptions, check all exit codes, notify and stop if anything is amiss. I also have my backup script notify on success, with the time it took to back up and the size and delta size (versus the previous backup) of the resulting backup. 99% of errors get caught by the checks and I get a failure notification. But just in case something silently goes wrong, the size of the backup (too big or too small) is another obvious indicator that something went wrong.
I know. I just had become lazy enough to take the daily notification’s subject line (“backup4l has run successfully”) as evidence that everything was OK. If I had looked inside the bloody mail I’d have notices that the backup’s size was 0B all the time because my self-rolled XZ-compression script failed to add data to the archives it “successfully” created. That’s what I meant with “re-testing” - I should better have written “re-validate”. My unforgiveable fault was not to look directly at the generated archives after changing the compression from bz2 to xz. Which was pretty pointless anyway as it turned out.
I let my work computer use one drive. It’s not my stuff. I don’t care about privacy or who has access to it or what MS does with it. Plus it’s easier when they force me to another machine.
Admin here! OneDrive synced home folders at work. Everyone ignores saving because ‘autosave’. Once a week at least, some staff member spends hours on something after the mandatory 90-day password change, never signed back in to OneDrive, and gets to kiss all that work goodbye. Also, once a quarter at least, someone was working on a document shared to the by an employee who just quit, so we have to frantically ‘unfire’ someone’s account so the suddenly missing document can be retrieved.
90-day password changes?? You monster!!
sigh I know. It’s my boss that implemented the policy… But it was after she audited password ages and a dictionary and found that CompanyName123 was universal and for years at a stretch.
Ah, such nostalgia. I used a complex password until they forced monthly resets on us and I forgot mine a few times. After that, “FuckingPassword1”, “FuckingPassword2”, FuckingPassword3" etc with a mysterious post-it note on my table with a single number. Very memorable, still remember it well after a decade.
Also, once a quarter at least, someone was working on a document shared to the by an employee who just quit, so we have to frantically ‘unfire’ someone’s account so the suddenly missing document can be retrieved.
I imagine that’s mostly a concern for admins and less so for the end-user.
No, it’s end-user panic. “That report me and Bob were working on? It’s gone! Emergency! Panic!”
Not only is it panic, but by the time you’re looped in it’s already half way up the management chain and you can’t see the end of the cc list.
If it’s something I care about, code and scripts I use for my admin stuff, it’s on GitHub. Stuff that I will keep when I leave or get fired/laid off. The stupid bullshit paperwork for work, can’t care less if onedrive eats it. But I know exactly what you are talking about, been there and done that.
As the admin you should fix onedrive seamless sso so th yr don’t need to worry about signin.
Windows is just malware designed to steal files and data from the people “stuck” using it.
