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.
I know why. Because they were using OneDrive.
I dont want to jump to conclusions since techspot is a dogshit outlet for information. Can anyone give me an example of onedrive users losing their files? I checked out a few reddit posts and tech fourm posts and none of the users seem to have actually lost files due to one drive. It seemed that users were getting confused at the onedrive file path overriding their default home path or unhappy that their onedrive hit a storage limit. Like most of the posts are about things that very clearly cant happen with onedrive.
I think it may have happened to me. I had a file saved to my documents at work, I go to check on it and it’s got a red X and won’t open.
I also sync the documents directory to gdrive and because onedrive deleted it, so did gdrive.
It’s unimportant work stuff though on a work machine so it doesn’t bother me that much.
Oh no it’s far worse than that. Essentially what happens is One Drive takes over your entire home holder, and then makes the copy in OneDrive the original. People try to disable OneDrive and then delete the copies in the cloud, only to find out OneDrive will then delete the local copies from your computer.
Yes one drive replaces the default path locations with its own onedrive locations but the local folders are still there under ~/users/user/Documents etc. Also Disabling onedrive doesnt delete the copies, they are still there in microsoft cloud the user needs to go grab them. The users are using a tool that moves unused files to the cloud, its expected that they take the necessary steps to reverse that when they stop using that tool. You cant just disable onedrive and expect everything to magically be downloaded back unless you click the download all button or go to the website.
The issue is users dont know how it works and dont want to know. I dont blame them since microsoft is so dogshit at ui/ux to the point where its malicious.
No if you download the local copies back then delete them from OneDrive, OneDrive will delete the local copies you restored to your computer.
It’s also important to note that the users aren’t “Using OneDrive” intentionally, so they aren’t even aware that there are steps they’d need to reverse.
The issue isn’t the users at all. The issue is that Microsoft has a software that takes files off your computer without permission and puts them on their computers. And then make sure it’s obtuse to safely get them back.
No if you download the local copies back then delete them from OneDrive, OneDrive will delete the local copies you restored to your computer.
No because they would go to the download folder which isnt synced with onedrive.
users aren’t “Using OneDrive” intentionally
Yes this is the biggest issue with onedrive but its still on users to administer their system at the end of the day. That means doing the bare minimum research when removing something as integral as Onedrive. You cant just turn off a home directory sync service and not make sure your stuff has been downloaded out of that service.
At this point I’m surprised there’s still files, and not an AI trained on the files that you have to describe the contents to so it can maybe give you something resembling your file.
UBUNTU!!! I am a professional sound engineer forced to use W11 (or iOS if I had more money) but the SECOND my hardware has Linux support I’m gone. God I HATE MicroSCUM with their onedrive vomit account pukiness (sorry, I could not control myself just now)
You realize anything iOS that Apple has been doing this for years with icloud.
Out of interest what type of engineering and what type of hardware? I’m a (lifelong) music Hobbyist with a passing interest who also works in tech stuff kind of. I’m presuming live sound is your world since you mentioned ios rather than mac os ? Linux seems the perfect candidate for that world though I guess the various companies also do their own proprietary systems in the digi mixer worlds and such ?
I run a recording studio and I use RME hardware
I heard its microslop now, their CEO loves it.
Ubuntu has kind of fallen out of favor with a lot of people, myself included. It used to be my go to, then I went mint, now I run fedora Bluefin.
Ubuntu has kind of fallen out of favor with a lot of people, myself included. It used to be my go to, then I went mint, now I run fedora Bluefin.
IMO, if they want to Ubuntu, let them. We all have our favorite flavors, but whatever they’re comfortable with is a fine point to start with.
This. It’s not my favorite, but another person coming to Linux is good. I’m not about to turn them away with an “achchktually…”. Plus it’s about personal choice anyway, so
Oh for sure, do what you want to do. I’m just saying, while everyone has their opinions, some people like to follow the crowd of popular opinion, and the crowd is moving away from Ubuntu. Maybe not everyone knows that 🤷♂️
Ubuntu is like the moon. It waxes and wanes with the spinning of the earth. Basically every few years it gets popular then every few years those people that made a popular move to something else and it drops in popularity and then suddenly it becomes popular again when a new group of people come out and try linux. It’s a very user friendly basic version of Linux that can be made very powerful.
If they want ubuntu, let them Linux Mint! :D
Why not straight up Debian?
Because the standard version of Mint uses the ubuntu repositories. You get to utilize most of what makes up ubuntu, but decoupled from the stuff Canonical wants to push. It has some added polish as well.
It was more of an ubuntu-specific reply rather than “what’s the best distro” thing.
But now that you mention it, there is also Linux Mint Debian Edition! :D
I might actually start using LMDE at work, since we have some stuff that’s more focused on debian than ubuntu.
Ubuntu has kind of fallen out of favor with a lot of people, myself included.
The whole “We’re using snaps now. We like snaps so you like snaps” attitude rankled a lot of people.
This only happens if you use Windows with an online account. Poor souls were probably forced to do this.
What does that mean? If I have a 3+ year old Windows am I unlikely to be affected?
If you use Windows with a local account and unlinked to OneDrive, yes.
What does that mean. A local account?
That’s what I said. A… local account. I’m confused. A local account is an account that only works with your PC, a regular user account not related to any web service.
Yep! My windows 10 is not hooked up to a real Microsoft account. It tries to force me to create an account every few months, which I laugh at.
I made the mistake a few years ago on my win 10 gaming tower and creating an account to play Xbox live, and suddenly, I was getting that garbage one drive shit.
I run a recording studio and I use RME hardware
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.
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
I thought I was going insane. I have been losing files frequently, but have a detailed file tree and I’m diligent about naming and saving versions.
I would guess it trys to “backup” them to onedrive and deletes the local copy but there is some problem that causes it not to actually add it to the onedrive, so result is no file anywhere. And it does this with its own permission of course, without informing user about anything.
It switches to storing files on Onedrive without warning.
Then if you disable Onedrive, you lose access to your files (on Onedrive) and their memory space is reused.
It doesn’t actually delete local storage, as the path is just switched.
No the issue is once enabled your home directory becomes onedrive. People feel they are saving files into their users/myuser/Documents but they’re actually saving it to users/myuser/Onedrive/Documents. These files are being synced off into the cloud and only pulled down when requested. Then the user decides they dont want onedrive and so they turn it off by unlinking their account. Now they feel they’ve lost their files but they havent the files are still in one drive and they need to go get them after that they have local files as normal.
Its purely user error encouraged by microsofts pushy implementation and bad design.
It is this, coupled with so many people not even knowing that they are using OneDrive (because it was automatically enabled if you have a Microsoft account linked to your Windows install, and Microsoft pushing to link your account).
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.
So I had the weird issue that none of my shortcuts were showing the proper icon, instead showing the blank piece of paper placeholder(even in the taskbar). Was digging through some other settings for something and found a bunch of one drive settings left on. Turned them all off and suddenly my icons are back to normal. Not sure if it was trying to access the files in the cloud instead of locally and wasn’t loading them properly or what. Either way, One Drive absolutely fucks a lot of random things up
Switching to Mint turns out to be quite a decision. Missing none of the fun.
Just wait until you actually need to restore using timeshift.
i don’t know how to use such black magic.
I’ve done that a few times now without issue. What’s wrong with it?
rolling back or restoring data from a cooked system?
Rolling back, sometimes because of file system corruption (had damaged RAM). Shouldn’t restoring be similar as long as the snapshot is intact?
Having had to fix a friend’s installation because timeshift filled up the system drive, I would say one of the biggest problems of mint is that it comes with timeshift enabled by default (and with shitty settings). I recommend keeping manual backups, and not trying to restore a system, as opposed to setting it up from scratch.
I use [not arch, but] debian, btw - haven’t had the system break on me in > 10 years. At worst, some driver gets messed up temporarily, but nothing that ever rendered my system unusable.
I think its fine to have by default but issue is that when people run into critical problems its not easy to restore from the back up. Currently if you cook your system you need to put a live USB in and then run timeshift and restore.
I would consider it to be an easy to use backup tool if the timeshift backups are in the grub menu to be booted into if there is any issues with the main install. But I dont know if this is possible or not.
Well - to be fair, if you “cook your system”, you have a boiled system. It would be haphazardous to rely on the system booting for restoring a backup. It could be an option, I guess, as long as the system still boots.
After using TimeShift, I find Deja Dup better than TimeShift.
Have seen similar comments on that specifically on mint before, does mint have a particular problem with it? I used timeshift to restore manjaro a couple of times and it was very confusing but I assumed it was just me.
I thought TimeShift was a bit of a pain to restore from. So I switched to Deja Dup and haven’t had any issues with it.
Never used Mint, but Time Shift was a god send to me for about two years on EndeavourOS. My first two years on Linux. I was able to learn so much by not having to worry about breaking my install.
I rolled back more times than I can count without ever really encountering any issues.
Set it up to automatically take a snapshot before every update, and add the few most recent snapshots to grub. All automated and really easy to set up.
Fortunately I have backups on proton drive and Dropbox
I discovered this week that on three separate dates around a year ago, a bunch of files in my team’s SharePoint were deleted. this went undiscovered until now because working with those projects was put on hold last year, and only the files themselves were deleted (not the folder structure).
if the folders had been deleted too, I might have noticed and thought “hey didn’t we have something here?” but since only the files inside the folders and subfolders were deleted, and those files were not being worked with, I did not notice
tysm microsoft
