9 ms·

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

222 points by mikecarlton 9mo ago

Forgeties79 9mo ago
Whelp browsing this on my phone was one way to remind me to put my VPN back on holy crap. In the middle of the article is an embedded TikTok video about the subject of the article while three different ads were overlapping my screen. Unbelievable.
- gruez 9mo ago
  >remind me to put my VPN back on don't you mean adblock?
  - edoceo 9mo ago
    VPN can do that too!
  - Forgeties79 9mo ago
    Any VPN worth its price has built in malware/ad blocking
- yakkomajuri 9mo ago
  Duck browser ftw
- specproc 9mo ago
  Boingboing used to be brilliant, I got into Doctorow through it. Absolute trash now, so sad.
- frm88 9mo ago
  Privacy Badger for Firefox blocks the TikTok. I assume there is a PB for Chrome?
p_ing 9mo ago
One user's stupidity becomes Internet bait for something that's saved so, so much time. I remember playing the backup & restore game when rebuilding my PC, which I just happened to do last night as I received a new SSD. I didn't have to worry about documents and thanks to a separate volume, redownloading my Steam library, either. That was a massive time save. And it didn't have to be OneDrive, it could have been any cloud sync service -- but OneDrive works just fine. The user just fucked up and had a conniption fit on Tiktok.
- JohnFen 9mo ago
  OneDrive doesn't always work fine, though. I avoid it like the plague because a OneDrive screwup caused me loss of valuable data. Was it user error? Maybe, maybe not, but that's irrelevant. If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily.
  - close04 9mo ago
    > If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily. Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them. In tech you are surrounded by footguns and bear traps. MS made it that much worse by wrapping these in dark patterns that may change without notice but the logic that "dangerous things should be prohibited" is a perfectly good way to end up living in an environment where someone else curates what you can and cannot do. For your protection of course. A tool isn't dangerous because you can make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake (you can make one with a kitchen knife and we still use them every day). It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations like OneDrive did. The article is accompanied by a TikTok video I can't scrub through so I can't tell why it's not possible to go to OneDrive's recycle bin and recover the lost data.
    - greatgib 9mo ago
      Here it is really not a "footgun" that can shoot you accidentally, it is really volontary awful dark patterns. You say delete my "onedrive" storage content, why on earth someone sane should expect that Microsoft will also delete the data one your computer, that you never asked to be sent to OneDrive in the first place.
lovegrenoble 9mo ago
F* OneDrive
greatgib 9mo ago
[flagged]
- reddalo 9mo ago
  Yeah, I agree. Google Photos is super confusing. Why would anybody ever want their pictures to disappear from their phone if they delete them on the web? It doesn't make any sense.
  - tetromino_ 9mo ago
    > It doesn't make any sense. It makes perfect sense to me. I rely on that feature. My monitor is big and it's much easier to use the big screen to sort vacation photos and delete the 90% which are garbage and not worth preserving. When I delete the garbage ones, of course I want to delete them everywhere. (And if I accidentally deleted the wrong photo, I can undelete within 30 days.)
    - greatgib 9mo ago
      What doesn't make sense is that it is not explicit, and it is not easily and clearly configurable!
- 0x_rs 9mo ago
  Google's Photos application is intentionally designed in such a way to hold people's files hostage. It will ask to back your stuff up on startup without the user being able to permanently disable it, with only the classic "Not now, I'm sorry my digital overlords, ask me about it next week" option being available. What will happen is that people that don't know better accept it to get it out of their way, have all their personal pictures uploaded to Google's servers where they are abused in all sort of ways (including getting a father reported to police for CSAM and permanently blocking his account for taking a picture of his son to send a doctor), and because the free plan has a limited space available but won't be respected during upload, they'll start panic-bombing the user with "All your pictures are going to be deleted if you don't pay up or clean". This is all intentional, of course: Google and its developers know the vast majority of its Android users don't know or care about all of this and will exploit that. The Gallery app doesn't have the same Google Drive constant reminder and is what I usually install when I see the above repeatedly happen on other people's devices, which is well over a dozen times now, but Photos cannot be removed, of course.
piker 9mo ago
Happened to me 2 nights ago with a document my wife was editing on my laptop. I booted up Windows, which forced me to start some process while I was half paying attention. Windows booted normally but my Desktop was missing that critical file. It was in my history? Check Recent documents? Check Visible in the file explorer? Check Desktop? No dice Try to open from the file dialog... error. The message? Can't get it from some URL. My wife wakes up and starts crying. She's spent hours. What the fuck? I understand computers, and files don't just disappear. "Were you editing it with Tritium?" (blames my product!) Wait, a URL? I bet it's some OneDrive dark pattern. Fix it by de-selecting "backup" multiple times and then clicking "submit". Files magically re-appear after I make sure to tell Microsoft to "keep my local copy".
- lostmsu 9mo ago
  This story is very unclear on what exactly happened and what caused files to be "deleted". I bet on user error.
  - Rygian 9mo ago
    This being Microsoft, the null hypothesis is "user error induced by intentionally evil UX".
    - vee-kay 9mo ago
      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.
bell-cot 9mo ago
Maintaining local, off-line backups is an endless PITA. But consider the alternative... :(
- ReptileMan 9mo ago
  The main question is who is in control not whether it is off or online. Microsoft obviously thinks that users are not, and it is Microsoft. We should have been more careful with embracing the walled gardens.
  - p0w3n3d 9mo ago
    Tbh I don't understand why 'Microsoft thinks that users are not' maybe because my kids are not logged in to onedrive yet. Do I understand correctly that MS tricks the users somehow to synchronize folders with cloud?
    - tracker1 9mo ago
      Kind of... you now have to sign into windows with a Microsoft Account, that has a starting (free) tier OneDrive, that will "easily" enable and start operations against directories you may not recognize are syncing, and even if disabled may change with automatic forced updates... it will then start nagging you to create a paid account for more storage, etc... otherwise tie you into Office products, where it starts saving to OneDrive by default, which you may not recognize and that doesn't even get into a lot of the dark patterns and manipulation. FTR, I've used it and usually configure to explicitly only sync a single directory.
      - p0w3n3d 9mo ago
        isn't there some powershell/magic command to disable sync at all? or you are forced to sync one directory?
  - bell-cot 9mo ago
    For "off-line backups", I'm thinking air gapped. Or on a backup server running no MS software, and using a filesystem with frequent & reliable snapshots.
expedition32 9mo ago
What I hate about it is that it's turned on automatically. It's basically just holding your computer for ransom because guess what the 20 gigabyte they give you for free doesn't cut it lmao. Don't call it a backup my SSD is 2 terrabyte and I ain't paying you anything.
nubskr 9mo ago
Helping my mom recover from OneDrive's "cleanup" was the closest I've come to negotiating with terrorists.
- fuzzfactor 9mo ago
  As time marches on, Onedrive has actively continued to blur the difference between local file storage vs storage in their cloud. No doubt this has gotten more "seamless" in recent years than it was at first. The exact definition of "deceptive trade practices".
dkdcio 9mo ago
maybe I’m just getting old, but I’m really tired of these [super popular product tons of people use but EVERYONE hates it] posts and comments. just quickly checking the Apple App Store, the Onedrive app has 4.7 stars does everyone hate it?
- blizdiddy 9mo ago
  Mcafee for iPhone has 5 stars. iBeer has 5 stars. Every app in a search of “DMV” has five stars. Every “gpt” ai clone app has 5 stars.
  - AlexandrB 9mo ago
    No doubt there's a lot of review spam as well. Apple has also gotten lazy with cracking down on review dark patterns. I noticed apps are getting away with the "pop up review dialog -> positive: go to OS level review window -> negative: go to in-app feedback form" pattern.
- debugnik 9mo ago
  The kind of people willing to leave stars on an app store are already a biased sample.
  - dymk 9mo ago
    Yeah, for lower ratings. People leave reviews because they’re pissed, not mildly happy.
    - gcr 9mo ago
      On iOS at least, an app can quickly ask for a star rating via a modal dialog. No review necessary. Thanks to dark patterns, users sometimes think it's asking them to rate their previous experience, or the podcast they're listening to, but those wind up tallied as app star ratings.
  - nebezb 9mo ago
    How does this translate to apps with low ratings, or something in the middle?
recursivedoubts 9mo ago
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 people unintentionally end up using One Drive, which is free until it isn't and then they can jam you with a subscription. Many of my students barely have an understanding of what a file system is and how it works now due to this horrible user-hostile UI. MacOS is headed this direction as well. Congrats linux: you just need to continue to get worse at the relatively slow rate that you always have and you will be the best desktop/laptop OS within a few years.
- samiv 9mo ago
  It's really sad if you think about that delivering the best desktop UX is all about just not actively sabotaging it on purpose. Win the game by doing nothing while the competition drives themselves into the ground via enshittification. After 40 years of computing this is the best we can do? No wonder we can't have nice things. Maybe the Windows users should be called "victims" at this point.
- p0w3n3d 9mo ago
  enshittification of the NET and now OS continues. The problem is that students nowadays have very little opportunity to learn this. My daughter does not understand what a pendrive is and when the data is on her phone and when on the SD card (meanwhile sd card slots are being sunsetted in all the brands). This is cartel to remove the data ownership possibility from people. Recently Polish youtuber got his video blocked because he showed how to play locally stored mp3 files (accused of breaking yt policy on allegedly showing people how to download illegal files) If we allow companies to put an equals mark between not storing your own data in cloud and piracy, this will finish the cartel's objective very fast.
- lostmsu 9mo ago
  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.
davisr 9mo ago
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.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- arghwhat 9mo ago
  You can absolutely be mad at a lawnmower that cut your foot off as there isn't any scenario where your feet should be at risk during normal operation of a regular lawnmower. Unless I intentionally try to insert my foot into the blades somehow, such dangerous faults would be entirely on the manufacturer. Now if you proceed with he same horrible lawnmower and cut off your other foot, then that might be on you. While the analogy is being stretched, same applies here - if Microsoft makes terrible footguns, then that's on Microsoft even if the users should have stopped using Microsoft by now.
- JohnFen 9mo ago
  > If you're using Microsoft in 2026, that's on you. Not necessarily. I don't use Microsoft on my personal machines, but my employer forces me to use it at work.
- the_snooze 9mo ago
  Microsoft is staffed by highly educated adults. They have agency to do better and actually serve their paying customers well. They choose not to.
  - davisr 9mo ago
    No, Microsoft is staffed by over-educated conformists who were specifically hired to maintain that empire.
    - fulafel 9mo ago
      Their problem is that they've cultivated a customer base who are ok with Windows for 30+ years.
juancn 9mo ago
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.
- aaomidi 9mo ago
  GPU drivers are legit easier on Linux than they are on windows at this point.
  - juancn 9mo ago
    I haven't had any issues with NVidia's on the latest machine I built (like nothing). It's just an optional update whenever I remember to check for one.
  - Phlebsy 9mo ago
    I get ~weekly crashes using an Nvidia card with arch/hyprland, but honestly it's less problematic for me to deal with than windows updates. I can format and rebuild my machine from scratch in less time than windows takes to download and perform an update. Flawless experience on non-nvidia hardware though.
    - gcr 9mo ago
      That's arch/hyprland though. You're even making it harder for yourself than it needs to be.
      - dTal 9mo ago
        That's understating it. There's no amount of skill that will render that setup stable - it's baked into the way those projects are managed.
        rescbr 9mo ago
        That's why I keep using Gentoo and X11 to handle my three GPU setup. An Intel iGPU, an AMD dGPU on the same package as the Intel CPU and a RTX 4060 Ti eGPU connected through Thunderbolt.
jwnin 9mo ago
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 completely separate & unlike Windows Explorer and is just unpleasant to work with.
- CWuestefeld 9mo ago
  My experience is exactly the same. I use OneDrive for easy replication of lots of stuff between my own devices, and to transfer files to friends. I've never had a lost-data problem. On the other hand, UX for doing that sharing is clunky. And I believe it's pretty well documented that the reason for the File-Save experience being so awful is that Microsoft is actively trying to deter us from using our own local storage, and coercing us to use their (subscription) cloud products.
- trinix912 9mo ago
  The problem with this thinking is that you can never be sure these problems won’t happen to you. I’m pretty sure it had worked just fine for the users in the article too, until it didn’t. IMO they should clearly encourage users to keep backups elsewhere in case something happens, but they’re currently doing the exact opposite: encouraging users to back up (and on Windows even store) files exclusively on OneDrive.
- psygn89 9mo ago
  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.
  - tracker1 9mo ago
    Definitely and still a happy paying Dropbox user, even though I'm well within my free limits (after several referral storage bumps). IT pretty much just works, but the Linux experience could use some updates.
zeroonetwothree 9mo ago
I’ve used OneDrive for like 8 years without issues. It works great for me.
- einpoklum 9mo ago
  Well, if "great" agrees with sharing all your data with the US government, then maybe. This happens as part of the PRISM program, whose existence was leaked by Edward Snowden last decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM as part of that program, online communications and storage of all users of large US tech companies, including Microsoft, is made accessible to the NSA.
ryandvm 9mo ago
MS has been doing shit like this for decades. Every couple months I log into my dusty Windows account and lo and behold there's a bunch of weird shit like Candy Crush or Copilot or whatever that's just decided to reinstall itself for the nth time. I just noticed yesterday that Copilot or OneDrive is pressuring me to set it up and my options are: Yes, Remind me in 1 week, or Remind me in 1 month. Like, what the fuck is that? It is a testament to the power of tech policy momentum that a company can crank out absolute shit for decades and the corporate world just keeps on using their software because "that's what we've always used". As far as I'm concerned, I'm fine with these tech CTOs replacing their software engineering workforce with LLMs because the bar is already on the fucking floor when it comes to use experience.
- chuckadams 9mo ago
  I've noticed that about Windows, that it has some sort of attachment disorder: the longer you're away from it, the more it freaks out and throws a tantrum about something the next time you boot it up. If it's been 3 or more months, you can absolutely forget about your settings staying as they were.
- bee_rider 9mo ago
  > As far as I'm concerned, I'm fine with these tech CTOs replacing their software engineering workforce with LLMs because the bar is already on the fucking floor when it comes to use experience. The engineers can’t be completely to blame here, Microsoft is too consistently bad for that. It is a high-level strategy issue. Replace the Product Managers with LLMs maybe… a bunch of random matvecs couldn’t possibly be wrong so consistently, right?
  - ryandrake 9mo ago
    The engineers must share partial blame. They’re developing the actual software after all!
AlexandrB 9mo ago
Saw someone calling Microsoft "Microslop". Seems appropriate given their enthusiasm for AI, lack of software quality, and lack of regard for user experience.
- touristtam 9mo ago
  Used to call that Windblows and Microsucks in my early 20s, I am not sure it was edgy back then and I am sure it isn't now. The UI/UX changes from ME > XP > Win8. At least you could keep the _classic_ look until Win10, I am not certain is the case with Win11 and what every Windows Copilot is coming next.
51Cards 9mo ago
First thing I do on any Windows machine is uninstall OneDrive anywhere possible. It's caused me enough grief that I just avoid it entirely at this point.
meetingthrower 9mo ago
...and even if they suck it into onedrive, good luck finding it! Is it in my work onedrive, personal onedrive, a "teams" folder, or did they relabel it to a sharepoint folder? No idea! Everything is now saved on my downloads folder because my file system is so whacked with all these other virtual folder overlays....
- tracker1 9mo ago
  Man, I wanted to like Teams folder mounts.. what a mess. Aside: WTF isn't the Teams wiki using markdown files you can edit and sync locally? I mean if this has changed since I last tried, cool... but that's the single biggest thing I wanted from this. Now, I just put a _docs directory into my projects and have markdown files in there sync'd to the git repo... I've given up on files in teams for the most part. Also with teams, splitting up chats and meating chats is a pain... the "activity" indicator doesn't tell you WTF subtab for chat something is in now. I used to at least halfway like teams if you avoided (over)using features, now it's just a craptastic mess.
snielson 9mo ago
I love OneDrive. I don't know why everyone hates it. I save things in OneDrive, and they are backed up to the cloud and synced with the other computers I use. Some computers are shared by six family members, each with their own MS account and 1TB of storage. OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive but still give everyone ready access to their files by not storing them all on the hard drive. If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder I create outside Onedrive. I've never had any problems. The comments by people who hate make me wonder why my experience is so different than theirs.
- apexalpha 9mo ago
  OneDrive on Windows with 6 users is probably fine. Try adding Teams, Sharepoint and 9000 more people in the mix. Oh and MS Office that will try to force it on you.
- samiv 9mo ago
  That's because you're using it. The problem comes when people who don't want to use it are tricked,.manipulated, fooled and dark patterned into using it against their understanding.
- CWuestefeld 9mo ago
  I agree here, but... If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder My complaint is that MS has intentionally made it SO DIFFICULT to do that. There's a significant amount of extra clicking and thinking necessary to go through the steps to do it.
  - SvenL 9mo ago
    The windows Explorer and the save dialog make it pretty easy to save a file somewhere else. Also, there is just one folder which syncs with OneDrive but some many more which don’t sync with OneDrive.
  - moontear 9mo ago
    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.
PaulHoule 9mo ago
I quit using OneDrive early in the Win 8 era. To point out how shambloic it was it was originally called SkyDrive but they were forced to rename it thanks to a trademark lawsuit. I mean, they launch a product that is so important to them that they are willing to make us all miserable shoving it down our throats and they can't be bothered to spend a few $100 or $1000 on a trademark search. I was working with Word and found that it defaulted to OneDrive which I could have lived with if it worked. Except it didn't work and when I tried to save documents I could not save. Needless to say that was the last time I used OneDrive. Microsoft doesn't get it Force somebody to use it -> It fails -> Somebody never uses it again Third-party vendors like DropBox, Box and many others have made products that look like OneDrive but actually work and never make it so I can't save my work. I have OneDrive completely disabled on my personal PC. I still found I couldn't find files that I had created with Word in the filesystem. Turns out even if you don't have the OneDrive service running on your PC, Office will store files in OneDrive directly through the API -- it's not hard to turn off (thanks Copilot!) but it's one more thing to be resentful about.
josefritzishere 9mo ago
I have had to turn off One Drive after a series of incidents where it deleted or rendered files unrecoverable. It's basically malware to me.
ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
[dupe] OneDrive just deleted all of my files https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493506
dmix 9mo ago
I found out my mom was paying for OneDrive because her Android phone autosynced a bunch of her files and she ran out of 'space'. She had no idea what it was but the OS pushed it hard. Microsoft gets their tendrils everywhere.
- gschizas 9mo ago
  Could be worse, it could be syncing to Google Photos. Oh, you want to download all photos so that you can free the cloud space? Too bad, you can only download them one by one. Or use Google Takeout and leave half of them undownloaded.
SanjayMehta 9mo ago
I use iCloud, Dropbox and OneDrive for family, professional use and junk files respectively. Works out really well. They all work perfectly for their intended uses.
- timbit42 9mo ago
  > uses Are you implying each one's intended uses are different? What are the differences?
  - SanjayMehta 9mo ago
    iCloud is trivial to set up for a family account. We're all on macs. My company uses Dropbox which is windows and mac. For some reason Microsoft gave me 40Gb of free storage on skydrive in their early days, and it was always a little off to use, mostly due to search. So it ended up being used to store misc files like software installers which I can always find elsewhere if OneDrive misbehaves.
newsoftheday 9mo ago
When I have to use Windows for work (which I 100% would prefer over Mac when I can't have Linux Desktop), I've found OneDrive works best if you give it one file. I gzip a tar file on Windows and let OneDrive sync that. As long as it's only one file, it does a good job. Whatever you do, don't try to sync a git repo folder with OneDrive.
- tracker1 9mo ago
  Just curious why you would consider syncing a repo already under git? (assuming it's sync'd to github/azure/gitlab etc)
OptionOfT 9mo ago
It's interesting because on one hand there are posts like this were most people agree, and then there are posts about LLMs how they can one-shot a Windows application. I think they're related. Software Engineering is about enumerating these edge cases and dealing with them. That requires skill. Vibe-coding, or even prompting for larger chunks of code doesn't force you to enumerate these edge-cases. And I firmly believe that reviewing the code for those edge-cases is harder than writing it yourself, as by nature you have to work backwards. You've arrived at a place, and you need to find out which routes were taken, and whether those routes are correct. Guardrails, snow-chain warnings, slope % warnings etc. When you've arrived at the place it's easy to say: eh, whatever. We got here. Ship it. Especially with the push from above these days to go faster.
apexalpha 9mo ago
Every time I need to add my file and send it out I manually download it first. The shenanigans that happen when you 'link' to files, or not, from Teams to Outlook to Sharepoint is beyond me. They also constantly sneak it into Word. If you don't pay close attention they suddenly save your local file to some Cloud Desktop folder.
joecool1029 9mo ago
Yeah I was in the minority that actually defended OneDrive but I'm facing my own issues with it recently. I'm aware of the windows default client behavior but on systems I have the storage on, I modify it to pull down everything. Bad UX on Microsoft's part but it's not related to what appears to be bigger issues under the hood. Back in October I had issues with the Linux dlang Onedrive client deleting all the files shared with me. Unlike Microsoft, the developer actually acknowledged there could be a problem and we figured out the cause was new unintended behavior caused by an old config option, really long issue thread for it here: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/issues/3475 https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/issues/3475 (TL:DR it was a very niche situation unlikely to have affected anyone else, I have more concise thoughts on it in the Gentoo bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/964370 https://bugs.gentoo.org/964370 ) So that was really bad, but we were able to restore all the deleted files from her OneDrive web using its recycle bin. That leaves me with the issue I'm facing now. Some of the files which I created and put in the share she shares with me have my ownership but OneDrive doesn't recognize I created it and she can't change the permissions to share back to me. So now I have to figure out how many files are affected here and I guess copy them on her side so the new files get her ownership and share back properly to me. I do want to say as well, those files just don't show up at all on my side in OneDrive but they DO show up in my Office apps recent list. It just refuses to let me open them. She sees them though with my ownership and both the web and windows onedrive clients throw errors if she tries to change the permissions. Absolutely maddening.
cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
In a healthy market with viable competition this would either not happen or be swiftly corrected by a massive drop in market share. So what’s gone wrong?
- timbit42 9mo ago
  People are locked in. It's not easy to switch to another product. Even if someone is willing the pay the price for another system and pay to have the data moved and apps repurchased, they now have to learn a new OS.
  - cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
    But that’s the thing, why is it this way? Driving a Hyundai or a Toyota you wouldn’t notice the difference, but learning a new OS is so hard that people don’t do it. I wish the ergonomics would be more standard so switching costs aren’t so high.
    - timbit42 9mo ago
      Because it benefits the tech companies to make their user interface different enough to make it difficult to relearn another one. There are no official standards like there are for the vehicle user interface.
      - cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
        Vehicles don’t have an official standard, just a de facto one. If someone invented a superior way to control a vehicle everyone else would adopt it. But things have settled I guess. I guess the set of inputs to a car is smaller than a computer..
phs318u 9mo ago
The article makes valid points about users misunderstanding how OneDrive works (and ascribing the misunderstanding to “dark patterns”), but I’ve been using Linux (first pop-os and now cachyos) for years, while at the same time shadowing most (not all) of my home directory to OneDrive[0] (I have an annual x365 subscription and that 2TB cloud storage is hard to ignore). I’ve had no issues whatsoever, though admittedly I’m not your average user (40 years in tech). I also make local backups of course, but tbh the utility of having my files available from anywhere is pretty useful to me. YMMV. [0]. A huge shoutout to the folks behind the amazingly solid https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive
senectus1 9mo ago
I support an environment with well over 20k devices across windows, android and ios that use one drive. no major issues here. sure its got the occasional bug, and is missing some features i think it should have... but all in all its very usable.
standardly 9mo ago
I absolutely can't deal with sync conflicts, they are confusing and infuriating. So I don't use any form of automatic cloud sync, anywhere. Once you accidentally overwrite a file with an older version open on another system, its hard to go back to that nonsense
Jaskolka 9mo ago
OneDrive quietly replaces C:\Users\root\Desktop with C:\Users\root\OneDrive\Desktop. No warning, just hijacks your folder structure. Good luck figuring out where your files actually went.
abmann_author 9mo ago
I agree with most of the comments posted below. Dual instances of OneDrive in my folder view and failure to complete sync while files go missing although I can see them in Word documents which indicate their exact location. This is trash!!

222 points by mikecarlton 9mo ago

Whelp browsing this on my phone was one way to remind me to put my VPN back on holy crap. In the middle of the article is an embedded TikTok video about the subject of the article while three different ads were overlapping my screen. Unbelievable.

gruez 9mo ago
>remind me to put my VPN back on don't you mean adblock?
- edoceo 9mo ago
  VPN can do that too!
- Forgeties79 9mo ago
  Any VPN worth its price has built in malware/ad blocking
yakkomajuri 9mo ago
Duck browser ftw
specproc 9mo ago
Boingboing used to be brilliant, I got into Doctorow through it. Absolute trash now, so sad.
frm88 9mo ago
Privacy Badger for Firefox blocks the TikTok. I assume there is a PB for Chrome?

p_ing 9mo ago

One user's stupidity becomes Internet bait for something that's saved so, so much time. I remember playing the backup & restore game when rebuilding my PC, which I just happened to do last night as I received a new SSD. I didn't have to worry about documents and thanks to a separate volume, redownloading my Steam library, either. That was a massive time save. And it didn't have to be OneDrive, it could have been any cloud sync service -- but OneDrive works just fine. The user just fucked up and had a conniption fit on Tiktok.

JohnFen 9mo ago
OneDrive doesn't always work fine, though. I avoid it like the plague because a OneDrive screwup caused me loss of valuable data. Was it user error? Maybe, maybe not, but that's irrelevant. If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily.
- close04 9mo ago
  > If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily. Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them. In tech you are surrounded by footguns and bear traps. MS made it that much worse by wrapping these in dark patterns that may change without notice but the logic that "dangerous things should be prohibited" is a perfectly good way to end up living in an environment where someone else curates what you can and cannot do. For your protection of course. A tool isn't dangerous because you can make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake (you can make one with a kitchen knife and we still use them every day). It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations like OneDrive did. The article is accompanied by a TikTok video I can't scrub through so I can't tell why it's not possible to go to OneDrive's recycle bin and recover the lost data.
  - greatgib 9mo ago
    Here it is really not a "footgun" that can shoot you accidentally, it is really volontary awful dark patterns. You say delete my "onedrive" storage content, why on earth someone sane should expect that Microsoft will also delete the data one your computer, that you never asked to be sent to OneDrive in the first place.

lovegrenoble 9mo ago

F* OneDrive

greatgib 9mo ago

[flagged]

reddalo 9mo ago
Yeah, I agree. Google Photos is super confusing. Why would anybody ever want their pictures to disappear from their phone if they delete them on the web? It doesn't make any sense.
- tetromino_ 9mo ago
  > It doesn't make any sense. It makes perfect sense to me. I rely on that feature. My monitor is big and it's much easier to use the big screen to sort vacation photos and delete the 90% which are garbage and not worth preserving. When I delete the garbage ones, of course I want to delete them everywhere. (And if I accidentally deleted the wrong photo, I can undelete within 30 days.)
  - greatgib 9mo ago
    What doesn't make sense is that it is not explicit, and it is not easily and clearly configurable!
0x_rs 9mo ago
Google's Photos application is intentionally designed in such a way to hold people's files hostage. It will ask to back your stuff up on startup without the user being able to permanently disable it, with only the classic "Not now, I'm sorry my digital overlords, ask me about it next week" option being available. What will happen is that people that don't know better accept it to get it out of their way, have all their personal pictures uploaded to Google's servers where they are abused in all sort of ways (including getting a father reported to police for CSAM and permanently blocking his account for taking a picture of his son to send a doctor), and because the free plan has a limited space available but won't be respected during upload, they'll start panic-bombing the user with "All your pictures are going to be deleted if you don't pay up or clean". This is all intentional, of course: Google and its developers know the vast majority of its Android users don't know or care about all of this and will exploit that. The Gallery app doesn't have the same Google Drive constant reminder and is what I usually install when I see the above repeatedly happen on other people's devices, which is well over a dozen times now, but Photos cannot be removed, of course.

piker 9mo ago

Happened to me 2 nights ago with a document my wife was editing on my laptop. I booted up Windows, which forced me to start some process while I was half paying attention. Windows booted normally but my Desktop was missing that critical file. It was in my history? Check Recent documents? Check Visible in the file explorer? Check Desktop? No dice Try to open from the file dialog... error. The message? Can't get it from some URL. My wife wakes up and starts crying. She's spent hours. What the fuck? I understand computers, and files don't just disappear. "Were you editing it with Tritium?" (blames my product!) Wait, a URL? I bet it's some OneDrive dark pattern. Fix it by de-selecting "backup" multiple times and then clicking "submit". Files magically re-appear after I make sure to tell Microsoft to "keep my local copy".

lostmsu 9mo ago
This story is very unclear on what exactly happened and what caused files to be "deleted". I bet on user error.
- Rygian 9mo ago
  This being Microsoft, the null hypothesis is "user error induced by intentionally evil UX".
  - vee-kay 9mo ago
    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.

bell-cot 9mo ago

Maintaining local, off-line backups is an endless PITA. But consider the alternative... :(

ReptileMan 9mo ago
The main question is who is in control not whether it is off or online. Microsoft obviously thinks that users are not, and it is Microsoft. We should have been more careful with embracing the walled gardens.
- p0w3n3d 9mo ago
  Tbh I don't understand why 'Microsoft thinks that users are not' maybe because my kids are not logged in to onedrive yet. Do I understand correctly that MS tricks the users somehow to synchronize folders with cloud?
  - tracker1 9mo ago
    Kind of... you now have to sign into windows with a Microsoft Account, that has a starting (free) tier OneDrive, that will "easily" enable and start operations against directories you may not recognize are syncing, and even if disabled may change with automatic forced updates... it will then start nagging you to create a paid account for more storage, etc... otherwise tie you into Office products, where it starts saving to OneDrive by default, which you may not recognize and that doesn't even get into a lot of the dark patterns and manipulation. FTR, I've used it and usually configure to explicitly only sync a single directory.
    - p0w3n3d 9mo ago
      isn't there some powershell/magic command to disable sync at all? or you are forced to sync one directory?
- bell-cot 9mo ago
  For "off-line backups", I'm thinking air gapped. Or on a backup server running no MS software, and using a filesystem with frequent & reliable snapshots.

expedition32 9mo ago

What I hate about it is that it's turned on automatically. It's basically just holding your computer for ransom because guess what the 20 gigabyte they give you for free doesn't cut it lmao. Don't call it a backup my SSD is 2 terrabyte and I ain't paying you anything.

nubskr 9mo ago

Helping my mom recover from OneDrive's "cleanup" was the closest I've come to negotiating with terrorists.

fuzzfactor 9mo ago
As time marches on, Onedrive has actively continued to blur the difference between local file storage vs storage in their cloud. No doubt this has gotten more "seamless" in recent years than it was at first. The exact definition of "deceptive trade practices".

dkdcio 9mo ago

maybe I’m just getting old, but I’m really tired of these [super popular product tons of people use but EVERYONE hates it] posts and comments. just quickly checking the Apple App Store, the Onedrive app has 4.7 stars does everyone hate it?

blizdiddy 9mo ago
Mcafee for iPhone has 5 stars. iBeer has 5 stars. Every app in a search of “DMV” has five stars. Every “gpt” ai clone app has 5 stars.
- AlexandrB 9mo ago
  No doubt there's a lot of review spam as well. Apple has also gotten lazy with cracking down on review dark patterns. I noticed apps are getting away with the "pop up review dialog -> positive: go to OS level review window -> negative: go to in-app feedback form" pattern.
debugnik 9mo ago
The kind of people willing to leave stars on an app store are already a biased sample.
- dymk 9mo ago
  Yeah, for lower ratings. People leave reviews because they’re pissed, not mildly happy.
  - gcr 9mo ago
    On iOS at least, an app can quickly ask for a star rating via a modal dialog. No review necessary. Thanks to dark patterns, users sometimes think it's asking them to rate their previous experience, or the podcast they're listening to, but those wind up tallied as app star ratings.
- nebezb 9mo ago
  How does this translate to apps with low ratings, or something in the middle?

recursivedoubts 9mo ago

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 people unintentionally end up using One Drive, which is free until it isn't and then they can jam you with a subscription. Many of my students barely have an understanding of what a file system is and how it works now due to this horrible user-hostile UI. MacOS is headed this direction as well. Congrats linux: you just need to continue to get worse at the relatively slow rate that you always have and you will be the best desktop/laptop OS within a few years.

samiv 9mo ago
It's really sad if you think about that delivering the best desktop UX is all about just not actively sabotaging it on purpose. Win the game by doing nothing while the competition drives themselves into the ground via enshittification. After 40 years of computing this is the best we can do? No wonder we can't have nice things. Maybe the Windows users should be called "victims" at this point.
p0w3n3d 9mo ago
enshittification of the NET and now OS continues. The problem is that students nowadays have very little opportunity to learn this. My daughter does not understand what a pendrive is and when the data is on her phone and when on the SD card (meanwhile sd card slots are being sunsetted in all the brands). This is cartel to remove the data ownership possibility from people. Recently Polish youtuber got his video blocked because he showed how to play locally stored mp3 files (accused of breaking yt policy on allegedly showing people how to download illegal files) If we allow companies to put an equals mark between not storing your own data in cloud and piracy, this will finish the cartel's objective very fast.
lostmsu 9mo ago
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.

davisr 9mo ago

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.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
arghwhat 9mo ago
You can absolutely be mad at a lawnmower that cut your foot off as there isn't any scenario where your feet should be at risk during normal operation of a regular lawnmower. Unless I intentionally try to insert my foot into the blades somehow, such dangerous faults would be entirely on the manufacturer. Now if you proceed with he same horrible lawnmower and cut off your other foot, then that might be on you. While the analogy is being stretched, same applies here - if Microsoft makes terrible footguns, then that's on Microsoft even if the users should have stopped using Microsoft by now.
JohnFen 9mo ago
> If you're using Microsoft in 2026, that's on you. Not necessarily. I don't use Microsoft on my personal machines, but my employer forces me to use it at work.
the_snooze 9mo ago
Microsoft is staffed by highly educated adults. They have agency to do better and actually serve their paying customers well. They choose not to.
- davisr 9mo ago
  No, Microsoft is staffed by over-educated conformists who were specifically hired to maintain that empire.
  - fulafel 9mo ago
    Their problem is that they've cultivated a customer base who are ok with Windows for 30+ years.

juancn 9mo ago

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.

aaomidi 9mo ago
GPU drivers are legit easier on Linux than they are on windows at this point.
- juancn 9mo ago
  I haven't had any issues with NVidia's on the latest machine I built (like nothing). It's just an optional update whenever I remember to check for one.
- Phlebsy 9mo ago
  I get ~weekly crashes using an Nvidia card with arch/hyprland, but honestly it's less problematic for me to deal with than windows updates. I can format and rebuild my machine from scratch in less time than windows takes to download and perform an update. Flawless experience on non-nvidia hardware though.
  - gcr 9mo ago
    That's arch/hyprland though. You're even making it harder for yourself than it needs to be.
    - dTal 9mo ago
      That's understating it. There's no amount of skill that will render that setup stable - it's baked into the way those projects are managed.
      - rescbr 9mo ago
        That's why I keep using Gentoo and X11 to handle my three GPU setup. An Intel iGPU, an AMD dGPU on the same package as the Intel CPU and a RTX 4060 Ti eGPU connected through Thunderbolt.

jwnin 9mo ago

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 completely separate & unlike Windows Explorer and is just unpleasant to work with.

CWuestefeld 9mo ago
My experience is exactly the same. I use OneDrive for easy replication of lots of stuff between my own devices, and to transfer files to friends. I've never had a lost-data problem. On the other hand, UX for doing that sharing is clunky. And I believe it's pretty well documented that the reason for the File-Save experience being so awful is that Microsoft is actively trying to deter us from using our own local storage, and coercing us to use their (subscription) cloud products.
trinix912 9mo ago
The problem with this thinking is that you can never be sure these problems won’t happen to you. I’m pretty sure it had worked just fine for the users in the article too, until it didn’t. IMO they should clearly encourage users to keep backups elsewhere in case something happens, but they’re currently doing the exact opposite: encouraging users to back up (and on Windows even store) files exclusively on OneDrive.
psygn89 9mo ago
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.
- tracker1 9mo ago
  Definitely and still a happy paying Dropbox user, even though I'm well within my free limits (after several referral storage bumps). IT pretty much just works, but the Linux experience could use some updates.

zeroonetwothree 9mo ago

I’ve used OneDrive for like 8 years without issues. It works great for me.

einpoklum 9mo ago
Well, if "great" agrees with sharing all your data with the US government, then maybe. This happens as part of the PRISM program, whose existence was leaked by Edward Snowden last decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM as part of that program, online communications and storage of all users of large US tech companies, including Microsoft, is made accessible to the NSA.

ryandvm 9mo ago

MS has been doing shit like this for decades. Every couple months I log into my dusty Windows account and lo and behold there's a bunch of weird shit like Candy Crush or Copilot or whatever that's just decided to reinstall itself for the nth time. I just noticed yesterday that Copilot or OneDrive is pressuring me to set it up and my options are: Yes, Remind me in 1 week, or Remind me in 1 month. Like, what the fuck is that? It is a testament to the power of tech policy momentum that a company can crank out absolute shit for decades and the corporate world just keeps on using their software because "that's what we've always used". As far as I'm concerned, I'm fine with these tech CTOs replacing their software engineering workforce with LLMs because the bar is already on the fucking floor when it comes to use experience.

chuckadams 9mo ago
I've noticed that about Windows, that it has some sort of attachment disorder: the longer you're away from it, the more it freaks out and throws a tantrum about something the next time you boot it up. If it's been 3 or more months, you can absolutely forget about your settings staying as they were.
bee_rider 9mo ago
> As far as I'm concerned, I'm fine with these tech CTOs replacing their software engineering workforce with LLMs because the bar is already on the fucking floor when it comes to use experience. The engineers can’t be completely to blame here, Microsoft is too consistently bad for that. It is a high-level strategy issue. Replace the Product Managers with LLMs maybe… a bunch of random matvecs couldn’t possibly be wrong so consistently, right?
- ryandrake 9mo ago
  The engineers must share partial blame. They’re developing the actual software after all!

AlexandrB 9mo ago

Saw someone calling Microsoft "Microslop". Seems appropriate given their enthusiasm for AI, lack of software quality, and lack of regard for user experience.

touristtam 9mo ago
Used to call that Windblows and Microsucks in my early 20s, I am not sure it was edgy back then and I am sure it isn't now. The UI/UX changes from ME > XP > Win8. At least you could keep the _classic_ look until Win10, I am not certain is the case with Win11 and what every Windows Copilot is coming next.

51Cards 9mo ago

First thing I do on any Windows machine is uninstall OneDrive anywhere possible. It's caused me enough grief that I just avoid it entirely at this point.

meetingthrower 9mo ago

...and even if they suck it into onedrive, good luck finding it! Is it in my work onedrive, personal onedrive, a "teams" folder, or did they relabel it to a sharepoint folder? No idea! Everything is now saved on my downloads folder because my file system is so whacked with all these other virtual folder overlays....

tracker1 9mo ago
Man, I wanted to like Teams folder mounts.. what a mess. Aside: WTF isn't the Teams wiki using markdown files you can edit and sync locally? I mean if this has changed since I last tried, cool... but that's the single biggest thing I wanted from this. Now, I just put a _docs directory into my projects and have markdown files in there sync'd to the git repo... I've given up on files in teams for the most part. Also with teams, splitting up chats and meating chats is a pain... the "activity" indicator doesn't tell you WTF subtab for chat something is in now. I used to at least halfway like teams if you avoided (over)using features, now it's just a craptastic mess.

snielson 9mo ago

I love OneDrive. I don't know why everyone hates it. I save things in OneDrive, and they are backed up to the cloud and synced with the other computers I use. Some computers are shared by six family members, each with their own MS account and 1TB of storage. OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive but still give everyone ready access to their files by not storing them all on the hard drive. If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder I create outside Onedrive. I've never had any problems. The comments by people who hate make me wonder why my experience is so different than theirs.

apexalpha 9mo ago
OneDrive on Windows with 6 users is probably fine. Try adding Teams, Sharepoint and 9000 more people in the mix. Oh and MS Office that will try to force it on you.
samiv 9mo ago
That's because you're using it. The problem comes when people who don't want to use it are tricked,.manipulated, fooled and dark patterned into using it against their understanding.
CWuestefeld 9mo ago
I agree here, but... If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder My complaint is that MS has intentionally made it SO DIFFICULT to do that. There's a significant amount of extra clicking and thinking necessary to go through the steps to do it.
- SvenL 9mo ago
  The windows Explorer and the save dialog make it pretty easy to save a file somewhere else. Also, there is just one folder which syncs with OneDrive but some many more which don’t sync with OneDrive.
- moontear 9mo ago
  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.

PaulHoule 9mo ago

I quit using OneDrive early in the Win 8 era. To point out how shambloic it was it was originally called SkyDrive but they were forced to rename it thanks to a trademark lawsuit. I mean, they launch a product that is so important to them that they are willing to make us all miserable shoving it down our throats and they can't be bothered to spend a few $100 or $1000 on a trademark search. I was working with Word and found that it defaulted to OneDrive which I could have lived with if it worked. Except it didn't work and when I tried to save documents I could not save. Needless to say that was the last time I used OneDrive. Microsoft doesn't get it Force somebody to use it -> It fails -> Somebody never uses it again Third-party vendors like DropBox, Box and many others have made products that look like OneDrive but actually work and never make it so I can't save my work. I have OneDrive completely disabled on my personal PC. I still found I couldn't find files that I had created with Word in the filesystem. Turns out even if you don't have the OneDrive service running on your PC, Office will store files in OneDrive directly through the API -- it's not hard to turn off (thanks Copilot!) but it's one more thing to be resentful about.

josefritzishere 9mo ago

I have had to turn off One Drive after a series of incidents where it deleted or rendered files unrecoverable. It's basically malware to me.

ChrisArchitect 9mo ago

[dupe] OneDrive just deleted all of my files https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493506

dmix 9mo ago

I found out my mom was paying for OneDrive because her Android phone autosynced a bunch of her files and she ran out of 'space'. She had no idea what it was but the OS pushed it hard. Microsoft gets their tendrils everywhere.

gschizas 9mo ago
Could be worse, it could be syncing to Google Photos. Oh, you want to download all photos so that you can free the cloud space? Too bad, you can only download them one by one. Or use Google Takeout and leave half of them undownloaded.

SanjayMehta 9mo ago

I use iCloud, Dropbox and OneDrive for family, professional use and junk files respectively. Works out really well. They all work perfectly for their intended uses.

timbit42 9mo ago
> uses Are you implying each one's intended uses are different? What are the differences?
- SanjayMehta 9mo ago
  iCloud is trivial to set up for a family account. We're all on macs. My company uses Dropbox which is windows and mac. For some reason Microsoft gave me 40Gb of free storage on skydrive in their early days, and it was always a little off to use, mostly due to search. So it ended up being used to store misc files like software installers which I can always find elsewhere if OneDrive misbehaves.

newsoftheday 9mo ago

When I have to use Windows for work (which I 100% would prefer over Mac when I can't have Linux Desktop), I've found OneDrive works best if you give it one file. I gzip a tar file on Windows and let OneDrive sync that. As long as it's only one file, it does a good job. Whatever you do, don't try to sync a git repo folder with OneDrive.

tracker1 9mo ago
Just curious why you would consider syncing a repo already under git? (assuming it's sync'd to github/azure/gitlab etc)

OptionOfT 9mo ago

It's interesting because on one hand there are posts like this were most people agree, and then there are posts about LLMs how they can one-shot a Windows application. I think they're related. Software Engineering is about enumerating these edge cases and dealing with them. That requires skill. Vibe-coding, or even prompting for larger chunks of code doesn't force you to enumerate these edge-cases. And I firmly believe that reviewing the code for those edge-cases is harder than writing it yourself, as by nature you have to work backwards. You've arrived at a place, and you need to find out which routes were taken, and whether those routes are correct. Guardrails, snow-chain warnings, slope % warnings etc. When you've arrived at the place it's easy to say: eh, whatever. We got here. Ship it. Especially with the push from above these days to go faster.

apexalpha 9mo ago

Every time I need to add my file and send it out I manually download it first. The shenanigans that happen when you 'link' to files, or not, from Teams to Outlook to Sharepoint is beyond me. They also constantly sneak it into Word. If you don't pay close attention they suddenly save your local file to some Cloud Desktop folder.

joecool1029 9mo ago

Yeah I was in the minority that actually defended OneDrive but I'm facing my own issues with it recently. I'm aware of the windows default client behavior but on systems I have the storage on, I modify it to pull down everything. Bad UX on Microsoft's part but it's not related to what appears to be bigger issues under the hood. Back in October I had issues with the Linux dlang Onedrive client deleting all the files shared with me. Unlike Microsoft, the developer actually acknowledged there could be a problem and we figured out the cause was new unintended behavior caused by an old config option, really long issue thread for it here: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/issues/3475 https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/issues/3475 (TL:DR it was a very niche situation unlikely to have affected anyone else, I have more concise thoughts on it in the Gentoo bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/964370 https://bugs.gentoo.org/964370 ) So that was really bad, but we were able to restore all the deleted files from her OneDrive web using its recycle bin. That leaves me with the issue I'm facing now. Some of the files which I created and put in the share she shares with me have my ownership but OneDrive doesn't recognize I created it and she can't change the permissions to share back to me. So now I have to figure out how many files are affected here and I guess copy them on her side so the new files get her ownership and share back properly to me. I do want to say as well, those files just don't show up at all on my side in OneDrive but they DO show up in my Office apps recent list. It just refuses to let me open them. She sees them though with my ownership and both the web and windows onedrive clients throw errors if she tries to change the permissions. Absolutely maddening.

cadamsdotcom 9mo ago

In a healthy market with viable competition this would either not happen or be swiftly corrected by a massive drop in market share. So what’s gone wrong?

timbit42 9mo ago
People are locked in. It's not easy to switch to another product. Even if someone is willing the pay the price for another system and pay to have the data moved and apps repurchased, they now have to learn a new OS.
- cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
  But that’s the thing, why is it this way? Driving a Hyundai or a Toyota you wouldn’t notice the difference, but learning a new OS is so hard that people don’t do it. I wish the ergonomics would be more standard so switching costs aren’t so high.
  - timbit42 9mo ago
    Because it benefits the tech companies to make their user interface different enough to make it difficult to relearn another one. There are no official standards like there are for the vehicle user interface.
    - cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
      Vehicles don’t have an official standard, just a de facto one. If someone invented a superior way to control a vehicle everyone else would adopt it. But things have settled I guess. I guess the set of inputs to a car is smaller than a computer..

phs318u 9mo ago

The article makes valid points about users misunderstanding how OneDrive works (and ascribing the misunderstanding to “dark patterns”), but I’ve been using Linux (first pop-os and now cachyos) for years, while at the same time shadowing most (not all) of my home directory to OneDrive[0] (I have an annual x365 subscription and that 2TB cloud storage is hard to ignore). I’ve had no issues whatsoever, though admittedly I’m not your average user (40 years in tech). I also make local backups of course, but tbh the utility of having my files available from anywhere is pretty useful to me. YMMV. [0]. A huge shoutout to the folks behind the amazingly solid https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive

senectus1 9mo ago

I support an environment with well over 20k devices across windows, android and ios that use one drive. no major issues here. sure its got the occasional bug, and is missing some features i think it should have... but all in all its very usable.

standardly 9mo ago

I absolutely can't deal with sync conflicts, they are confusing and infuriating. So I don't use any form of automatic cloud sync, anywhere. Once you accidentally overwrite a file with an older version open on another system, its hard to go back to that nonsense

Jaskolka 9mo ago

OneDrive quietly replaces C:\Users\root\Desktop with C:\Users\root\OneDrive\Desktop. No warning, just hijacks your folder structure. Good luck figuring out where your files actually went.

abmann_author 9mo ago

I agree with most of the comments posted below. Dual instances of OneDrive in my folder view and failure to complete sync while files go missing although I can see them in Word documents which indicate their exact location. This is trash!!