Copilot has determined that it's better to save your files in OneDrive.
Oops, one of your jpegs violates Disney's copyright.
Authorities have been notified and your Microsoft account was deactivated.
All your files are gone, your email account is gone, your Windows PC will shut down now.
I swear, at my next job I'll ask for a Mac. We were forced to switch to windows 11 by our outsourced IT MSP, at my current job and it wasn't pretty.
If I can help it my future windows experience will be spinning up a VM on my proxmox host, and killing it off after use. No personal files will be going on there.
If you don't control your data you don't control your data... The cloud is just someone else's computer.... Back up your shit and keep some of those backups offsite but keep everything under your own control...
"If you don't control your data, you don't control your data...", statement of the century.
But yes we all should be taken care of our own data, and building up systems to help those who can't
There's advantages to saving documents to the cloud for backups.
Severely limiting that space by default and then preventing you from saving files when it runs out is horseshit. Half the computer problems I've fixed recently are all caused by OneDrive running out of space.
My sister wanted to know why her Sims saves were disappearing. Turns out OneDrive was full and the saves were being backed up to it. No space = no more saving apparently.
Because they know most people won't move to Linux. Most people will stick with whatever absolute garbage they know and will just be annoyed when things continue to degrade, but they won't leave.
On the other hand saves shouldn't be saved into fucking documents folder in the first place. Or it shouldn't be used by any other program unless explicitly allowed to. The only time I see people actually using Documents folder according to its purpose is at work.
Honestly this practice comes down to Windows never standardizing a location for user generated files related to a program. We might finally be there with appdata but even that is poorly standardized (what goes into ~/appdata/roaming/ vs ~/appdata/local/ etc.) and most backup software ignores despite game saves being very important. My Saved Games still exists but it's more surprising when a game actually uses it than anything. And of course really old software would just store the saves right next to the install files, therefore requiring the program to have admin access, and running everything as admin is always a great idea.
No no you misunderstand-- It's primary storage. Your 1TB hard drive is merely a local cache for the $70 OneDrive plan that you for some reason haven't subscribed to yet, but don't worry, you'll get lots of reminders to.
Well if you fill up the space you pay for... What is OneDrive supposed to do if you try to add more files? How would it pick which ones to upload to the cloud and which ones not to? It would be pretty annoying if it just let you keep adding data locally but stopped uploading it imo.
It should stop uploading new files, and visibly notify the user that their cloud storage is full.
It should not start silently deleting your data after you save something, especially because OneDrive likes to "replace" your Documents folder as it were.
Imagine you work really hard on some important document, save it, and then OneDrive lovingly deletes it for you with no way to get it back because you ran out of cloud storage. Instead of, you know, just keeping it stored on your local storage and telling you it can't upload it?
Because that's what it does now. Just deletes your stuff. OneDrive loses you more files than it saves. Terrible product and always the first thing I uninstall.
You know, I use Linux at work but use windows at home. I've been thinking of switching for a while. I think the thing that is going to push me over the edge is the difficulty that I have saving a file to my own god damned computer.
I love automatic backups to the cloud WHEN I CHOOSE TO USE THEM! I'm tired of Microsoft essentially holding my data for ransom, though.
Welp, they're never going to stop, and they're always going to get more intrusive. Linux is better than it has ever been! Give it a whirl. I suggest Pop!_OS for people who don't want to mess with their system, and Arch for people who love messing with their system.
I have a cheap laptop that I got solely for school to run their anti cheat Spyware for online tests. I hadn't turned it on since I updated it and it forced me to make a hotmail/outlook account or I couldn't use the laptop to take my test. Assholes almost made me late for it. Fuck microsoft.
The biggest irony in all of this is that the integration is so much better on Mac than windows. I think it's because it's less aggressive/less ingrained but the one drive,m365, whatever integration on my work Mac is night and day better than the windows machine I had.
I couldn't stand it. And don't get me started on team's weird SharePoint backend or whatever the fuck they have going on.
Part of it is Apple putting the smack down on cloud storage and forcing them to all go to the same place, which is ~/CloudStorage/<>, and follow some semblance of a standard. They don't get to do whatever the hell they want on OSX. People can hate Apple all day, I get it, but some things I appreciate, even if it is super irritating at first.
Remember SharePoint is just Visual SourceSafe for documents, with a bad editor .
Anyone who's worked with VSS will have the PTSD to know what's going to happen. We don't know when you're going into lose eveything, but we know it'll happen. MS rolling their own bad CVS is like MS rolling their own email infrastructure.
I have PTSD flashbacks of SharePoint and the ten step process we had to use to interact with it. Then in literally every meeting, "why didn't you read the SharePoint file on that?"
Ha. For a long time, Sharepoint would always ask me to log in, even though I had successfully logged into my laptop and was on the VPN and all of that. I finally called the help desk, and they couldn't figure it out, so they contacted their Sharepoint support, and they couldn't figure it out either.
Eventually, I needed a new laptop...and that fixed the problem.
I am presently working on a presentation for a group of people with average age 57. I need them to start storing files online. My options are windows shared folders, which requires a domain joined PC, of which I have a single loaner for about 80 people, and a VPN connection ... or SharePoint, fml, fuck my life ever so badly.
Is this on Windows 11? On 10 I can still direct it to an offline area of my drive.
To be fair people massively misunderstand OneDrive. It's not an extra storage space, it's a file sharing space. Which is incredibly useful in a work environment.
That's how Microsoft works. You'll build the work flow now, and then they'll slowly change the default. They will do this with all of their defaults, for a longer time than you will pay attention.
Keep everything local is a great strategy until your house burns down or your hard drive or SSD decides to end it's own life.
I'm not saying that you should use one drive. I'm saying that you should have backups. If all you can get is cloud storage, then one drive might fit the bill. Maybe it won't. I don't know you or what you want from a backup.
I back up my files to a NAS on my lan, but I also use one drive and Google drive when I need to.
All I'm trying to say is: one drive isn't necessarily the worst option. Raw dogging a single local storage drive as your only copy of the data you're trying to hold onto, is much worse than one drive.
Other than that, I'll just reiterate: back up your shit. And I want to add, check your bitlocker to see if it's on. If it is, back up your recovery key to somewhere safe. Bitlocker, in and of itself isn't a bad thing. I would argue that it's best practice to have some kind of FDE, and bitlocker can achieve that. Just back up the recovery key, for the love of God.
Pro tip. "Print" the recovery to a PDF, then email that file to yourself. Quick and easy. The option to save your recovery key to a file, will not allow that file to be saved to the drive that it unlocks, but if you print it, you can save it as PDF without the same limitations. Just don't leave it on the encrypted drive. Literally put it anywhere else. A USB drive, a NAS, an email, cloud storage, whatever you like. I'm not your boss.
Save yourself a metric fuckton of work, and/or lost data; back up your shit.
EDIT, some words (auto carrot), also, WTF? I'm being down voted for saying you should have backups? I expect better from lemmings.
Related, I'm a sysadmin, and I work in IT, and I approve this message. Back up your shit.
In my possession are two, what I'll call "master" drives. Two 16TB hard drives, exact clones of each other. They hold the bulk media, old photos, an entire library of books, backups with full emulator and rom sets, games, movies, series, Wikipedia backups, encyclopedias, cookbooks, plant guides, carpentry, mechanics, howtos, compressed into the tiniest dots my processor can manage.
Aside from being a backup for my personal files and configurations, It's essentially an arc of knowledge for societal collapse, granted laser-focused around what I find important, but still, important to someone.
My cousin, who I consider my brother, has a copy of this drive in a small, foam-padded pelican case in his closet. He keeps it for me just in case of a house fire, displacement, or any dangerous situation that renders any of the data at my actual home inaccessible.
While the drives aren't a perfect clone of my network's configurations as-is, that backup runs locally, the drives are 80% of the content I serve and would get me 80% of the way back to complete if anything ever happened. They would individually be invaluable if anything ever happened here or I had a Donnie Darko situation, especially if it's some authoritarian hellscape and the content isn't even available anymore.
Btw if you aren't ramping up your data collection due to the Trump goings on, you better be. Download EVERYTHING.