Windows users keep losing files to OneDrive, and many don't know why

Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨throws_lemy@reddthat.com⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.techspot.com/news/110848-onedrive-backup-feature-making-users-local-files-seemingly.html

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.

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OldQWERTYbastard@lemmy.world ⁨26⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
I’ve never lost a single file on OneDrive. That’s because I do not use OneDrive.

Eat shit, Microsoft.

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credo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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- alphabethunter@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Kyrgizion@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    +1 for Obsidian. Copy-paste to other pc = immediate access without setup. Plug & play. Also free.
    
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- purplemonkeymad@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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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brianary@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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- El_Scapacabra@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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goatinspace@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Image

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- FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Someone hacked the US government
  
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- InFerNo@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  This code is similar to the progress bar. When it reaches 100% do nothing for a while to keep people guessing.
  
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  - goatinspace@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Progress bar have to show random timing. It’s more complezzxx
    
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Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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Adam_Crock@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Linux welcomes all refugees

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- cecilkorik@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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. 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.
  
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  - FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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 if the game works anymore before I buy it’.
    
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  - Smoogs@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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.
    
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DaddleDew@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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 work 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 I worked on all day yesterday 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.

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- wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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:
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
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  - DaddleDew@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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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- user224@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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.
    
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JoMiran@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Image

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androidisking@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The problem is most users are unaware their files were being stored on the cloud in the first place. 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.

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- The_v@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  Honestly most of the issues with OneDrive are from one setting:
  
  Files On-Demand - it’s turned on by default. It uploads all the files in the drive to the cloud and then deletes them from the local computer. Its absolutely, fucking stupid and should be banned.
  
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TheTimeKnife@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Windows is just malware designed to steal files and data from the people “stuck” using it.

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redlemace@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
They are so lucky microslop auto installs the Windows Backup app … oh wait …

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- b_tr3e@feddit.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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 yopu 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.
  
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mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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

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floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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 their cloud quota and they want more money. Switching to local only is, by design, a huge pain that tends to go wrong.

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Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Its because they are using it.

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Auster@thebrainbin.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Why handle files? Let big bro Microsoft handle them for you.

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pyrinix@kbin.melroy.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Ha, shows you right.

God, people, just get yourselves flash drives or an external drive. Cloud storage is dumb.

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- degenerate_neutron_matter@fedia.io ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Most people aren't choosing to enable OneDrive; it's enabled by default, and not obvious how to disable.
  
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  - pyrinix@kbin.melroy.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Stop excusing the stupid. People are capable to learn to avoid it and disable it.
    
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- Triumph@fedia.io ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It's not dumb as a concept. Cloud storage in a data center offers far more safety than an external drive of any kind.
  
  But it should not be the only place your data is stored. It should ideally be the third place.
  
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- ji59@hilariouschaos.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  While I agree with you, most people don’t understand what cloud is and since Microsoft is pushing users to use OneDrive, general user would just turn it on just to get rid of the window.
  
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  - Sammy@infosec.pub ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Exactly. I work with the Elderly and it’s been a struggle to a) explain what OneDrive is and b) show the how to locally save because W11 defaults to saving to cloud.
    
    It’s an absolute mess and I’ve gotten at least 3 people to start using Linux, just a little.
    
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zqwzzle@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
On the other hand, a lot of people are learning how important a tested backup strategy is.

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- b_tr3e@feddit.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  …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 month I had been storing empty backups every day. Outch.
  
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  - suicidaleggroll@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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.
    
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myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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- phanto@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    As the admin you should fix onedrive seamless sso so th yr don’t need to worry about signin.
    
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  - Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    90-day password changes?? You monster!!
    
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  - myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    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 really only a concern for admins and less so for the end-user.
    
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Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Well, people need to learn to keep their fingers out of random, no cost cloud things. If this learning process involves painful data loss, maybe the lesson sticks better.

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Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Garbage article, but I think what they are saying is if you don’t restore your files from backup before you disable your onedrive backup, then you lose your files.

This sounds like user error.

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- underisk@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  If the people in question were choosing to use OneDrive in the first place, I might agree with you. Since MS is forcing this crap on everyone it’s their fault when people lose data to it.
  
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  - Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Last time I set up a user account onedrive was not forced. It’s suggested and you had to click a few buttons to turn it on.
    
    I wonder if other apps that do cloud offload work in the same way: disable service and you lose cloud-sync’d content unless you downloaded it ahead of time.
    
    I’m also curious if onedrive prompts you to save/downlod your data first.
    
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chunes@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
i’m so sick of hearing about the cattle version of windows 11.

the very least you can do is get the pro version, which doesn’t have any of the problems these articles always harp on.

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