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

[Liranan]

If I remember correctly, I disabled it with O&O ShutUp10, and it seems to be gone.

I even use O&O on LTSC.

 

[Melkor Unlimited]

One Drive to rule them all,
One Drive to find them,
One Drive to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Redmond where the lies lie.

 

[GeoffreyA]

I even use O&O on LTSC.

Brilliant tools, and essential in the current Windows era we're living in.

One Drive to rule them all,
One Drive to find them,
One Drive to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Redmond where the lies lie.

The language is that of Redmond, which I shall not utter here.

 

[eldakka]

Your practice (I'd rather call it anti-pattern) is a security nightmare. The "home" was invented for a reason. DOS was not a multi-user environment. Windows 9x wasn't either. Windows NT was the first such, and that's precisely when the concept of a home was invented.

Now, if you migrate your personal files out of your home, you also grant read access to every user on the system. Which may be your mom, your fiance, or some random dude on the internet that managed to hijack a new user into your system.

So, congratulations I guess.

You do understand that you can set permissions on any directory/file on an NTFS filesystem, not just your home (C:\Users\$USER), right?

If another user on the system has administrative rights, they can access the files wherever you put them if they are local, even in the default home directories.

 

[Liranan]

One Drive to rule them all,
One Drive to find them,
One Drive to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Redmond where the lies lie.

The Sauron on my desk is pleased.

 

[Squid Surprise]

For a single user system, sure... that might work. But if you have other users on it, you just let them have access to all your personal data. There would be no way I'd allow that.

You can password protect any folder/drive you want …

 

[DubiousFishHook]

Nope, its not april 1, just microsoft being incompetent as usual.

 

[MasterAce]

Your practice (I'd rather call it anti-pattern) is a security nightmare. The "home" was invented for a reason. DOS was not a multi-user environment. Windows 9x wasn't either. Windows NT was the first such, and that's precisely when the concept of a home was invented.

Now, if you migrate your personal files out of your home, you also grant read access to every user on the system. Which may be your mom, your fiance, or some random dude on the internet that managed to hijack a new user into your system.

So, congratulations I guess.

That’s the thing, it’s MY computer that sits in MY living room. Who is going to spy on it? Our household has plenty of computers and the last one they would consider using is my weird system that doesn’t work normally half the time. And I’m always on it anyways. It’s my own, because I dont want people moving the keyboard or adjusting the seat. And M$ has lost sight of us, tech enthusiasts. They make their product so generic, so slop, that it nolonger speaks to us. And I dare to say it all started with the home folder, taking away control and agency from the user.

 

[MTD2019]

Having recently suffered a OneDrive problem (29tb of phantom files) and working that out via chatbot, because Microsoft posts no coherent instructions on how to solve the problems caused by Microsoft coding, it was astounding and hard to believe just how *****ically OneDrive works in Windows. Onedrive actually works more stably in macOS, due to restrictions in macOS on how it can work, but if you use the same OneDrive account for macOS and Windows, my issue, utter havoc ensues. Like 29tb of phantom files. 29 tb.

 

[Vanderlinde]

There is a very simple solution to this problem: Don't use OneDrive.

You're welcome!

It's just there with no notice, opt-in or opt-out. I think it's better to move away from the whole Windows 11 garbage.

 

[Tantor]

Use O&O Shutup10 to turn off OneDrive, CoPilot and most of the MS telemetry.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

 

[OortCloud]

I'm no MS fanboi but I like OneDrive. It syncs across multiple machines, when I get a new PC it just gets all the files and away you go. I've been using it extensively for over a decade and have had no real issues with it. I guess the UI is a little opaque at times but once you understand how it works it's a great tool. The only really poor decision they made with OD in my opinion was to make it sync your desktop shortcuts. This makes no sense as often they are pointing at items only present on a single machine, but you can turn this off which is the first thing I do.

 

[jeffbert]

I have been using a separate HDD for my data for years now. Occasionally copy the whole thing to an external drive. Is that enough to keep my data safe?

 

[ZedRM]

It's just there with no notice, opt-in or opt-out. I think it's better to move away from the whole Windows 11 garbage.

Uninstall it, it's gone.

The default setup for Windows enabled OneDrive by default, and syncs anything on your desktop or your normal folders. Unless you notice the status column with a cloud you wont even know...until things go missing or refuse to open.

It's a major pain for us because while we know to disable it immediately and remove it, most people do not, then they bring us PCs that have gigabytes of files trapped on Onedrive that dont want to move, so you have to circumvent Onedrive, manually down the files, re organize them, then re back them up somewhere else (can you tell what I'm dealing with right now?). The people who own these machines have no idea what is going on.

If anyone else did something like this it would be classified as malware.

See above?

 

[nismo91]

The first thing I do with One drive on customer computers is set it to keep copies locally. They hide the setting under "Advanced settings" and then "Download all files". Very misleading wording, but it will then keep your files on your machine, although Microsoft will still copy them in a mob-like action to hit you up for money. Then, I disable it at startup, unless they want it to run.

this is the way. I've been using onedrive and sharepoint for roughly 9 years now and I always always checked "keep files locally" on the folder. you can just right click the folder in windows and check it.

I actually like the desktop version of onedrive because it syncs to the explorer. the web version though, I don't find it user friendly.

back to the article:
now the practice to enable onedrive on fresh windows installation though, is another story. I always uninstall onedrive in a new install. so that when a user wants to use it, he/she has to download and knows that he/she has to initiate and set up everything. but wait, that's because I don't use ms account on my windows. again, the practice of requiring a ms account on fresh install is yet another story.

so it looks like I dodged few bullets just because I don't use ms account on my windows.