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Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

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Re: Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

#121

Post by yourusername »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #100
moontear wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is? Not at all. Whatever I save from my browser (Edge/Firefox/Chromium) is automatically saved to Downloads and Downloads is not automatically synced with OneDrive Backup. Backed up is Documents, Music, Videos, Desktop etc. but Downloads not AFAIK.

That's true. I wasn't clear - I was thinking mainly of the Office products: Word, Excel, etc. They've got a whole different Save As dialog that go out of their way to funnel you into OneDrive. So it's interrupting my flow precisely in the course of things I need to use brainpower on themselves.

Additionally if you don't save on Onedrive autosave is disabled. Autosave worked decades ago before we even had cloud storage, but apparently in 2026 we just can't have feature parity with Word 97 without cloud storage.

Re: Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

#122

Post by vee-kay »

Rygian wrote: post #66
lostmsu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story is very unclear on what exactly happened and what caused files to be "deleted". I bet on user error.

This being Microsoft, the null hypothesis is "user error induced by intentionally evil UX".

For decades, the unofficial Microshit motto has been: Intel inside, Idiot outside.

Because Microsoft treated users as if they were idiots.

So basically tons of Windows related websites teach this infallible little trick as solution when a user gets a Windows BSOD (Blue Screen of Death): Reboot!

Invariably, the reboot causes the Windows OS to start working again, till the recurrence of whatever circumstances (typically, hardware and/or software conflicts) caused the BSOD in the first place. It is left to the user to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent the issue from recurring again, as the BSOD messages are typically cryptic for the average user to decipher (maybe not so difficult in the modern era of AI assistants invocable from a handheld smartphone).

In fact, I would say the whole IT industry grew tremendously over the last few decades, because Microsoft's products were powerful, user friendly (to an extent, and until they worked), but quite complex to maintain (the dreaded Windows updates nightmares) and troubleshoot in case of issues. That's because every company using M$ products needed dedicated IT Support teams solely for such maintenance, help and fixes for M$ products. Even other vendors like Oracle grew as competition to Microsoft's corporate dominance.

The wonderful (and sometimes terrifying) world of antimalware software may not even have existed were it not for Microsoft products.

Re: Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

#123

Post by psygn89 »

jwnin wrote: post #42

I use OneDrive at work for all of my documents and have never encountered the horror stories I frequently read. I read these stories often enough where I believe there genuinely is a problem. But I do wonder why there is a difference for some and not others. Perhaps I've conditioned myself to live with its faults? I will say that the Microsoft Office OneDrive save experience is completely subpar. It behaves completel…

I didn't have a problem until I migrated to another Mac. Then I started having duplicate files. I think I fixed it by logging out of everything and deleting the duplicates but it was a couple hours wasted. Didn't have this problem with Dropbox in my career.

Re: Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

#124

Post by bikelang »

juancn wrote: post #91
tantalor wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This flowchart continues to be more or less accurate: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/mx4dni/cho... Might need a little update to bring it up to date. Disclosure: I fear technology and my daddy is not rich.

I get the joke, but I disagree. It mixed hardware with software in a weird way. Macs are as much about the hardware than the software, and the OS is just another Unix variant. Much closer to Linux/BSD than Windows. I like tech (no fear, I've been coding for 41 years at this point), but I don't like configuration, I'm a programmer, not IT, and also I heavily lean to getting shit done, so I prefer tools that don't get…

I’m not sure what distro you used or how long ago this was - but I’ve been using Pop!_os as my general OS + dev env (and more recently switched off Windows to Bazzite for gaming) - and I’ve never once had to battle with audio or weird twiddling with settings to get stuff to work. In my experience - both have had the kind of out-of-the-box experience I’ve come to expect from Windows. If anything - Windows has required a lot more fiddling with settings and hunting down drivers as of late.

Re: Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

#125

Post by Zambyte »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #80
juancn wrote: post #33

Windows is not for doing serious stuff anymore, the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC (if you turn off all the nags, it's pretty decent). I work on a Mac, I run servers on Linux, I game on Windows.

Gaming is a smaller thing for me than the Adobe creative apps, especially Lightroom. Granted, I could get that on Macintosh. But while their fans like to claim that Apple's engineering is all about usability, that hasn't been true for quite some time. It's now become a status/elitism thing (see, e.g., yesterday's conversation about Tahoe icons). And their UX model is very contrary to my way of thinking about things.

Unless you need compatibility with Adobe file formats, Free editing software works fine too. I've been using Darktable for about a decade. People bash on GIMP for not being able to do what Photoshop can, but it's because GIMP is built with the intent of being extended by the user. It can be extended to do what people complain that it cannot do. Kdenlive is good at filling the needs met by Premiere. I think the hardest Adobe application for me to recommend a portable alternative to is After Effects. Maybe Blender can be coaxed into filling some AE uses.

Re: Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

#126

Post by adastra22 »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #80
juancn wrote: post #33

Windows is not for doing serious stuff anymore, the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC (if you turn off all the nags, it's pretty decent). I work on a Mac, I run servers on Linux, I game on Windows.

Gaming is a smaller thing for me than the Adobe creative apps, especially Lightroom. Granted, I could get that on Macintosh. But while their fans like to claim that Apple's engineering is all about usability, that hasn't been true for quite some time. It's now become a status/elitism thing (see, e.g., yesterday's conversation about Tahoe icons). And their UX model is very contrary to my way of thinking about things.

Apple has a lot of failings recently. But macOS still has far more claim to “usability” than Windows!

Re: Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

#127

Post by shash »

adastra22 wrote: post #126
CWuestefeld wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming is a smaller thing for me than the Adobe creative apps, especially Lightroom. Granted, I could get that on Macintosh. But while their fans like to claim that Apple's engineering is all about usability, that hasn't been true for quite some time. It's now become a status/elitism thing (see, e.g., yesterday's conversation about Tahoe icons). And their UX model is very contrary to my way of thinking about things.

Apple has a lot of failings recently. But macOS still has far more claim to “usability” than Windows!

If only because of the fact that the start menu (equivalent - the dock and applications view) isn’t an ad filled react app.

Re: Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

#128

Post by vee-kay »

lostmsu wrote: post #52
recursivedoubts wrote: post #22

OneDrive is an absolute cancer. I teach Computer Science and my students are constantly accidentally checking their repos out onto onedrive which, of course, makes the performance absolutely atrocious to the point of unusability, and it often affects the weakest students who are most likely to get knocked out of CS by unrelated issues like this. The UI in Windows is intentionally designed to confuse the issue so peop…

This take is weird. Git and OneDrive in a sense both are version control systems. What do you think would happen if you created a Git repository and a SVN repository in the same folder, then proceeded to add files from .git to SVN and let SVN manipulate them? It is not OneDrive's fault that your students don't understand version control.

Agreed. Using one file management version-control system within another, is a surefire recipe for trouble and disaster.

But it isn't the students' fault, I guess they are still learning how to use computers.

This is purely an IT Administration fiasco. The IT admin should simply exclude the repository folders/paths from OneDrive. Or make everyone to save non-code documents to a separate shared network path, which is a storage drive that gets automatically backed up daily.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-remove-a-folder-from-o...

Re: Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

#129

Post by einpoklum »

davisr wrote: post #30

If you're using Microsoft in 2026, that's on you. You can't be mad at the lawnmower that cut your foot off, it's just doing what it does.

It's not on me, it's on my employer, which forces me to use a laptop with MS Windows installed. Sure, I ssh into a machine running Linux where I do real work, but still.

Also - lots of people are used to it and habits die hard, regardless of technical merit etc.

Re: Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

#130

Post by catapart »

gcr wrote: post #108
catapart wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting this here, hoping desperately for someone to give me an example proving I'm wrong: It's insane to me that there isn't a simple, GUI-based app that provides this utility in a clean, straightforward way. Basically just "dropbox, but let me set the destination to another drive on my PC/network/VPN (or a 'repo', for 'advanced' users)". Just a plain interface that shows me my files and allows me to say "I want thi…

You want Time Machine and a WD Passport. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.

I appreciate the recc, but it misses the mark I think? Time machine is only on a single OS, and is designed as more of a "keep my whole system safe" backup rather than a "back these things up" backup.

I can understand why people might want to backup entire drives, or to backup OS content minimally, but my use-case is to just pick a few folders and only have those backed up. Not to an external drive, but to internal ones and network ones.

That's the tool I'm looking for. While Time Machine can exclude everything but the folders to backup, it doesn't seem to be able to back them up with different cadences or rules about content limits or whatever else. It's all or nothing. I'm just not sure it provides what I'm looking for.

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