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.
At this point I’m surprised there’s still files, and not an AI trained on the files that you have to describe the contents to so it can maybe give you something resembling your file.
Switching to Mint turns out to be quite a decision. Missing none of the fun.
Just wait until you actually need to restore using timeshift.
Never used Mint, but Time Shift was a god send to me for about two years on EndeavourOS. My first two years on Linux. I was able to learn so much by not having to worry about breaking my install.
I rolled back more times than I can count without ever really encountering any issues.
Set it up to automatically take a snapshot before every update, and add the few most recent snapshots to grub. All automated and really easy to set up.
Yes rolling back is easy but restoring from a major error using timeshift is not.
I’ve done that a few times now without issue. What’s wrong with it?
rolling back or restoring data from a cooked system?
Rolling back, sometimes because of file system corruption (had damaged RAM). Shouldn’t restoring be similar as long as the snapshot is intact?
Having had to fix a friend’s installation because timeshift filled up the system drive, I would say one of the biggest problems of mint is that it comes with timeshift enabled by default (and with shitty settings). I recommend keeping manual backups, and not trying to restore a system, as opposed to setting it up from scratch.
I use [not arch, but] debian, btw - haven’t had the system break on me in > 10 years. At worst, some driver gets messed up temporarily, but nothing that ever rendered my system unusable.
I think its fine to have by default but issue is that when people run into critical problems its not easy to restore from the back up. Currently if you cook your system you need to put a live USB in and then run timeshift and restore.
I would consider it to be an easy to use backup tool if the timeshift backups are in the grub menu to be booted into if there is any issues with the main install. But I dont know if this is possible or not.
Well - to be fair, if you “cook your system”, you have a boiled system. It would be haphazardous to rely on the system booting for restoring a backup. It could be an option, I guess, as long as the system still boots.
After using TimeShift, I find Deja Dup better than TimeShift.
Have seen similar comments on that specifically on mint before, does mint have a particular problem with it? I used timeshift to restore manjaro a couple of times and it was very confusing but I assumed it was just me.
I thought TimeShift was a bit of a pain to restore from. So I switched to Deja Dup and haven’t had any issues with it.
i don’t know how to use such black magic.
dropbox and google drive have both erased data from me without copying it properly. these are not “backup” services they destroy your data
Dropbox has a policy about two years ago that all of your data will be shared with AI, no opt-outs.
I immediately cancelled my plan and dropped to the free service, which I use to backup photos of my poop.
Honestly never use any cloud services without encrypting your files, I personally use cryptomator for example. They will all scrape the fuck out of everything, since why wouldn’t they? It’s not like they’ll be caught doing it
Ugh. Well they got all my shit already so no point changing now. I use my friends dropbox and hes a photographer and videographer for a living. Ironic that the very service hes paying for is going to scrape his data and replace him.
Most people ive ran into have no idea how to even access a file if its not in a Google drive or dropbox so good luck getting them to understand anything else. My friends complain non stop that I dont use corporate services for every single thing like they do 🙄
Cool
Been using both for decades never had one file go missing that I have ever not deleted myself, or set to remove after backup.
I haven’t died yet, if we are sharing random arbitrary personal experiences. I expect to in the future.
Well considering that I’ve been in the IT industry for over 20 years at this point. And as long as you have things set up properly and you know how things work then this really isn’t an issue. It’s not just my personal experience is also the experience of any of my clients it’s experience of any of the places that I’ve ever worked at it’s the experience of any of the thousands of people that I’ve interacted with and probably tens of thousands of people have interacted with over the past 20 years.
I hold the middle ground. When set up properly, the services do tend to work just fine when left alone. Consumers often have automatic updates enabled, that is where shit hits the fan sometimes. I have had the issue of files disappearing. Fortunately, they reappeared some time after. Not sure what Microsoft was doing – we will never know.
Been doing IT for nearly 30 years here.
Computers shit their pants whenever they feel like it.
I have been doing IT since 1867 and I’ve never run into an issue.
Bullshit, all punch cards eventually tear
I was hoping you’d play along :’(
I’ve been in the IT business for 26 years and I’ve seen software screw up, even when configured correct. OneDrive have lost many files for people to the point that Microsoft more or less apologised for it in 2015.
OneDrive is shit though.
Maybe, I just don’t like “And as long as you have things set up properly and you know how things work then this really isn’t an issue” - you can set things up correctly and then it still screws up. Everything works perfectly until it doesn’t.
Oh I fully agree out of all of these options one drive is definitely the worst of them. And I’ve seen many many files lost through one drive because it’s really difficult to configure it correctly and most the time it’s fucked up because Microsoft continually changes what you can and can’t do with it and how it updates and how it doesn’t update and now with the latest change and the forcing of users to utilize it it’s becoming even worse.
You don’t have backups for your files on Google drive?
Of course I do. But it’s also my backup for files. You always have at least 2 if not 3.
Okay, because you’re responding to a person saying they’ve lost files, on an article thread about people losing files. You seem to have all the tools to understand what’s being discussed and yet you’re still being obtuse about it.
No I’m calling their bullshit.
cool
You’re the kind of person that says gems like “Computers don’t make mistakes, sir”, Arent you?
Time to use TwoDrive
EDIT: Or “Time TwoDrive”, if you prefer
AIDRIVE, WILL be named changed from ONEDRIVE.
AIDRIVEWILLONEDRIVE?
TwoDrive or not TwoDrive that is the question
I prefer ThreeDrive or even FourDrive
Step into my office.
You’re fired.
8 minute abs! You can’t even get your heart pumping at the number 4!
Just don’t use TwoTimingDrive
Maybe the lost photos are in Zerodrive
Saving stuff yo dev null is handy. Always has space.
What about ThreeDrive?
I know why. Because they were using OneDrive.
I would guess it trys to “backup” them to onedrive and deletes the local copy but there is some problem that causes it not to actually add it to the onedrive, so result is no file anywhere. And it does this with its own permission of course, without informing user about anything.
No the issue is once enabled your home directory becomes onedrive. People feel they are saving files into their users/myuser/Documents but they’re actually saving it to users/myuser/Onedrive/Documents. These files are being synced off into the cloud and only pulled down when requested. Then the user decides they dont want onedrive and so they turn it off by unlinking their account. Now they feel they’ve lost their files but they havent the files are still in one drive and they need to go get them after that they have local files as normal.
Its purely user error encouraged by microsofts pushy implementation and bad design.
It is this, coupled with so many people not even knowing that they are using OneDrive (because it was automatically enabled if you have a Microsoft account linked to your Windows install, and Microsoft pushing to link your account).
It switches to storing files on Onedrive without warning.
Then if you disable Onedrive, you lose access to your files (on Onedrive) and their memory space is reused.
It doesn’t actually delete local storage, as the path is just switched.
Sounds like a reasonable idea for the issue presented. Mean the issue could be on one drive saying the file is there and complete, or many other issues since I don’t know the API in the least.
Yours would be my first guess for sure, it thinks it completed so delete local copy, which is what you’d prefer in that situation, well mostly, I sort of prefer a local working copy but need some other names and the program to recognize thm with then upload on actual save to the cloud storage…I say that and still curse at excel when it says it has a backup copy from a forced reboot, always keep one open heh.
Actually to be fair I hate those storages for that reason so much crap can go wrong without a knowledgeable user it makes things worse. You just hope the program can tell if it did it was done correctly heh and if not then end up clicking the wrong button and it’s all gone.
Local NAS for anything you think you’ll need, random ‘free’ cloud storage as a general backup. Mean I assume the NAS has raid so mostly good without more.
So let me get this straight. Microsoft is taking your local files, without their consent, onto their platform where they can delete them for “terms of use” violations, alongside tracking what you do on your own computer.
Sounds like they don’t want you to use your computer in a way they don’t want you to.
They’re scooping up all the data for AI. They rebranded Office to just being AI.
Who said it was your computer.
everybody, back when I bought it.
Whether or not they are “my” files would be the legal test in the given jurisdiction. It probably gets even blurrier if the file was created in ‘my’ licensed version of MS software application x. And blurrier still if created in the cloud version of said software and stored direct to their cloud storage platform . I’m assuming with most saas or cloud things that its never my file and im just renting access to something they own even if i created it. You distinguished “local” in your comment though, so this is where the win11 tactics have been a new level of scummy and scammy with the forced syncing etc . The whole OS is theirs. or is it mine ? Do i need a legal team everytime I install software? This whole idea of consent as well…. yikes . I’m glad we have options.
Their persistence in wanting to download my files is my number one problem with Windows, and it’s a huge one.
Poor design and shit software
We’ve tried nothing and we are all out of ideas dot gif
This only happens if you use Windows with an online account. Poor souls were probably forced to do this.
What does that mean? If I have a 3+ year old Windows am I unlikely to be affected?
Yep! My windows 10 is not hooked up to a real Microsoft account. It tries to force me to create an account every few months, which I laugh at.
I made the mistake a few years ago on my win 10 gaming tower and creating an account to play Xbox live, and suddenly, I was getting that garbage one drive shit.
If you use Windows with a local account and unlinked to OneDrive, yes.
Shit like is literally why i have a saved winscript json that gets run on all work machines after “updates”
Interesting. Care to share?
After you’ve configured your parameters, you can save the file for future re-runs, or on other machines. I just made a master that rips out all the bullshit (boss won’t pay for anything over home edition for the rendering machines) and slap it about
Thanks. I’ll check it out later today.
It was a PITA to get my files to save locally and to stop auto saving to OneDrive
I have uninstalled One Drive and enabled a system policy that supposedly sets the default save location to c:\user\documents, and after every single fucking update it defaults back to one drive, hangs for 30 seconds until the stupid ass system realizes that there’s no such thing present, and then it opens a “save as” dialogue with some arbitrary path in %user_apps/appdata/onedrive.
GNARF.
A better fix would be uninstalling Windows
It’s a work computer, so the answer is no.
You know that’s a novel and insightful musing that no one’s ever thought to share before.
It’s brave of you to go on Lemmy and suggest the solution to a Windows problem is to uninstall it.
A lot of people on lemmy long ago realized that if you have enough problems with windows, the problem is windows.
That fix has a lot of side effects that might break something. Unless you’re intimately familiar with their setup and use case, destructive solutions aren’t a safe recommendation.
UBUNTU!!! I am a professional sound engineer forced to use W11 (or iOS if I had more money) but the SECOND my hardware has Linux support I’m gone. God I HATE MicroSCUM with their onedrive vomit account pukiness (sorry, I could not control myself just now)
I heard its microslop now, their CEO loves it.
Out of interest what type of engineering and what type of hardware? I’m a (lifelong) music Hobbyist with a passing interest who also works in tech stuff kind of. I’m presuming live sound is your world since you mentioned ios rather than mac os ? Linux seems the perfect candidate for that world though I guess the various companies also do their own proprietary systems in the digi mixer worlds and such ?
I run a recording studio and I use RME hardware
You realize anything iOS that Apple has been doing this for years with icloud.
Ubuntu has kind of fallen out of favor with a lot of people, myself included. It used to be my go to, then I went mint, now I run fedora Bluefin.
Ubuntu has kind of fallen out of favor with a lot of people, myself included.
The whole “We’re using snaps now. We like snaps so you like snaps” attitude rankled a lot of people.
Ubuntu has kind of fallen out of favor with a lot of people, myself included. It used to be my go to, then I went mint, now I run fedora Bluefin.
IMO, if they want to Ubuntu, let them. We all have our favorite flavors, but whatever they’re comfortable with is a fine point to start with.
This. It’s not my favorite, but another person coming to Linux is good. I’m not about to turn them away with an “achchktually…”. Plus it’s about personal choice anyway, so
If they want ubuntu, let them Linux Mint! :D
Why not straight up Debian?
Because the standard version of Mint uses the ubuntu repositories. You get to utilize most of what makes up ubuntu, but decoupled from the stuff Canonical wants to push. It has some added polish as well.
It was more of an ubuntu-specific reply rather than “what’s the best distro” thing.
But now that you mention it, there is also Linux Mint Debian Edition! :D
I might actually start using LMDE at work, since we have some stuff that’s more focused on debian than ubuntu.
Ubuntu is just Debian with some closer to bleeding edge stuff installed then PPA and Snaps. Debian is more stable, you just have to wait a bit for the latest DM. I consider not having Snaps an advantage :)
I tried it out with Bookworm, Had KDE Plasma, Steam and everything else I wanted up without a lick of terminal work.
Mint is fine, though, honestly, all derivatives are fine. Cannocial is the one stand out that has their head of their ass, but they’re still better than windows.
Oh for sure, do what you want to do. I’m just saying, while everyone has their opinions, some people like to follow the crowd of popular opinion, and the crowd is moving away from Ubuntu. Maybe not everyone knows that 🤷♂️
Ubuntu is like the moon. It waxes and wanes with the spinning of the earth. Basically every few years it gets popular then every few years those people that made a popular move to something else and it drops in popularity and then suddenly it becomes popular again when a new group of people come out and try linux. It’s a very user friendly basic version of Linux that can be made very powerful.
So I had the weird issue that none of my shortcuts were showing the proper icon, instead showing the blank piece of paper placeholder(even in the taskbar). Was digging through some other settings for something and found a bunch of one drive settings left on. Turned them all off and suddenly my icons are back to normal. Not sure if it was trying to access the files in the cloud instead of locally and wasn’t loading them properly or what. Either way, One Drive absolutely fucks a lot of random things up
Happened to me, too. Now I just ignore OneDrive entirely. I don’t think Microsoft understands what cloud storage is supposed to be used for. If I delete something from the cloud, I should still have it locally on my PC. The fact that this isn’t the case means essentially, that OneDrive isn’t actually a cloud service. They’re trying to get you to pay a subscription fee to use your own hard drive. You know, the one you’re already using for free. I wonder why that isn’t taking off? 🤔
I don’t think Microsoft understands what cloud storage is supposed to be used for.
They understand it’s for training AI. They don’t care about anything else.
This is what made me stop using Google Photos and start self hosting Immich. I lost a video from my house construction that showed where the cables were exactly laid.
onedrive is even more intrusive than google drive.
I still haven’t forgiven google for hijacking the g:/ drive letter. I was using that letter already!
Not that it matters to me anymore since I use Linux now, but still.
I still prefer them hijacking a particular drive letter to Microsoft’s approach of not even using a drive at all
Yes thank you so much Microsoft for making every single employee’s file path different when we’re trying to send each other the location of files, all of them within unnecessary multiple levels at the start (inevitably resulting in file path too long issues) because the default installation is c users user documents OneDrive
this is actually one way that I see which of my new hires actually read the fucking onboarding document and followed the instructions. One of the first steps is “unlink your OneDrive account and set up a OneDrive folder in the root of one of your drives instead” (with actual instructions on how to do that). two out of three new hires without fail will send me a link in their first week that points to c users. It’s a nice litmus test for who is going to be useless and/or a pita
OneDrive is for syncing files across devices. It’s not a backup.
Edit:
Since there seems to be a lot of hate on my comment, allow me to explain.
Backup software has a schedule, it has monitoring, it has alerting (email, SMS, ticket submission, etc), and checksumming. OneDrive frequently just shits the bed for whatever reason, often goes unnoticed in the corner, and users frequently miss it and nobody, not even IT, know. Not to mention it’s riddled with bugs.
Yes, you are copying files from point A to point B but it is not the same. If you rely on onedrive as a “backup” you’re going to be disappointed at some point when you lose your files :)
If you delete a file over here, then it disappears from over there. That’s not a backup. On a real backup, if you delete files or lose them or whatever, you have days/weeks/months to go back on versions to restore.
The problem isn’t one drive’s purpose, it’s that it’s so shoveled into windows that people that have no idea what it is use it accidentally then see files disappearing. It’s unintuitive shovelware with terrible UX, a dreadful combination.
Oh. So it should be called Onesync?
Then it shouldn’t bitch at me about storage limits. Does it expect me to delete my shit again? All I’m hearing is OneDrive is better off being ignored entirely.
I disagree, it can easily be both. I pay for Google drive and don’t have the client on any of my devices except for my phone, and it’s replicated to my NAS. I use as a form of remote backup and not to sync files.
So like syncthing but you have to pay for it and requires a server. Seems useless…
If you want to sync while not all devices are online, just spend 50$ or something and get a RPI and put syncthing on it.
Right, so how many files you have on your laptop do you also need on your phone? How many desktop does Microslop think the average person has? If cloud storage is actually only cloud syncing, is there a market?
Most of them. I use my files across my Windows laptop, desktop, tablet, and Windows 10 Mobile. The syncing allows me to have access no mater what device I am on. Just because you don’t use this feature, does not mean it isn’t useful.
That’s why I asked about the actual files. I know it’s cool to have the ability but really it’s typically only specific files, not every fucking thing you ever opened or saved. And please keep in mind people on Lemmy are not your average user. Most people have a phone and one other device at most
Sorry, that makes no sense to me. These cloud sync apps are setup for mirroring. If you change one side, it’s reflected on the other. This is just user error (or poor UI, lack of explanation on what delete does in the cloud)
But what’s the point of it then?
I guess if you have multiple computers you can access the files from either computers. But for people that just have one computer the whole thing seems kinda useless. And then MS forces people to use this product they have no need for by holding their computer ransom. People don’t want their files on One Drive, they only have it because MS forced it upon them.
This is like forcing a passenger to fly a 747 and then saying “well the plane crashed because of pilot error” and ignoring the fact that someone was forced some to be behind the controls of something they understand against their will.
For a home user, a backup service or just a way to share files actually makes more sense than something that mindlessly syncs file actions, including deletes. One Drive could be useful if it were what people expect it to be. As it is, it’s useless for most people, and bad on them for thinking MS One Drive was a useful product I guess.
If that’s the case, then OneDrive shouldn’t bitch at me about storage limits. What does it want me to do? Delete my shit again?
Don’t point out people are misunderstanding the product, we’re here to shit on the product for anything and everything
To be fair when it’s a product a person didn’t ask for and the OS forced it on them, it’s not unreasonable that they may not understand how it works and make mistakes.
Yeah, you can’t yell at someone to RTFM when they didn’t opt to use the product, and the “manual” is just a barrage of question on a Microsoft support forum where every answer goes to a Microsoft.learn page that hasn’t been updated since 8.1.
It is unreasonable to assume you can delete a file from a sync app’s cloud dashboard and not expect that the deletion would be synced to the device.
I get that OneDrive is a mediocre product that gets forced on end users, but so many people turn their brains off and just try to kill it with fire instead of thinking through their actions before making rash decisions. Deleting it from the OneDrive directory is marginally less rash, but again, people delete files without validating the original is where they thought it was.
Read the article. That is not what is happening.
This problem stems from the way OneDrive handles synchronization between the cloud and a user’s local system. Disabling OneDrive Backup without explicitly restoring or relocating local copies can, in some cases, result in files being removed from both environments.
Pargin noted that the only way to remove files from OneDrive without also deleting them from the local machine is to follow a detailed, step-by-step guide “There is no intuitive way to do it,” he said, accusing Microsoft of deliberately burying the necessary controls deep within menus.
It is a dark pattern, it is meant to scare or annoy the users into paying a subscription or leave the system as is. There’s exactly one cloud service that deletes all files without warning as soon as it is disabled. There’s only one service that deletes local files without telling the users, there’s only one service that deletes both originals and cloud files when disabled, and it is only OneDrive. Every other service warns users and give grace periods for the users to download their data before deleting the files for good. It is absolutely not the user’s fault.
I wasn’t replying to the post, but the op who stated
If I delete something from the cloud, I should still have it locally on my PC.
It is unreasonable to expect users to understand.
It is unreasonable to expect users to understand.
Or read, be it app popups or error messages. Or learn how to use tools that have been in place for years. Or take basic responsibility for their inability or unwillingness to learn and understand.
At some point, saying “it’s unreasonable to expect the user to understand something” is itself unreasonable. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in IT for like 20 years, but I have minimal sympathy for people who choose not to understand the basic utilities that they have to interact with for their jobs that have been in place for a long time. At the very least, you should know how file management works if you’re making files as part of your job, and that you don’t just delete files from your system, especially important business files…
