Everyone Hates Onedrive, Microsofts Cloud App That Steals and Deletes Files
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The cloud storage landscape is abuzz with criticism for Microsoft's OneDrive, with users sharing horror stories of lost data and questionable design choices. While some commenters chimed in with tales of woe, like JohnFen, who blamed a OneDrive screwup for valuable data loss, others defended the tool, pointing out that user error is often to blame. A lively debate ensued, with close04 and greatgib weighing in on whether OneDrive's flaws are accidental "footguns" or deliberate "dark patterns" that can lead to catastrophic mistakes. As the discussion unfolded, it became clear that the real issue is not just OneDrive, but the broader implications of relying on cloud storage and the importance of being mindful of online security, with some users, like Forgeties79, even highlighting the need for VPNs and adblockers to stay safe online.
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don't you mean adblock?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But this wasn't a mistake, or at least not an unprovoked one. The user did nothing wrong. They operated under reasonable assumptions established by decades of computer tools. This was a user who didn't get cut by the knife's blade but by its handle. The tool was configured to operate against the user's interests, wishes, and reasonable expectations. This isn't "a dangerous tool" this is a developer who weaponized a tool. The danger is the practice of misleading the user. MS took a pipe and made it a pipe bomb, the solution isn't to declare pipes to dangerous to use.
> 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
From a reasonable user perspective of course it makes no sense. If you investigate from a technical perspective, knowing how the tool works, it "works as intended". OD Backup is not backup, it's storage. That's the first trick MS pulls. OD didn't back up your data, it moved it to the cloud and didn't tell you. This is the second trick MS pulls. Disabling the "backup" means disabling the storage of your single copy of the data. This isn't a trick, it's just the level of competence at MS.
Now I think that I understand your mistake. You think that onedrive moves the data to the cloud, and so obviously losing the cloud version makes you lose the file.
But it is not what is happening from my understanding, and here is the very dark pattern:
- The file is and stays in your computer. (Actually OneDrive doesn't know how to store more than what you have in local copy... totally miserable).
- So it is just a "copy" that is sent to the cloud.
- When you delete your files in their cloud (in the sense of getting ride of your storage there, and not only files), only then "OneDrive" actively goes to delete your files in your local disk!
I never asserted that. I asserted that if a tool is that dangerous, it shouldn't be used on a daily basis. I stand by that. Use it if it solves a problem for you, but intentionally every time, not as a matter of habit or in the background with automation.
> It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations.
OneDrive meets those criteria.
Agree to disagree. I will repeat, we are surrounded by dangerous tools that we use on a daily basis. Clearly the "danger" part is not the criteria that defines if or how often you should use the tool.
> OneDrive meets those criteria.
Correct. But those are my criteria, and I believe they are the ones that carry the argument. Your criteria was "is dangerous" which is not enough to carry the weight of your conclusion.
Correct, I'm just saying that I think your criteria supports my opinion. As you say, we disagree about this. Fair enough. I'm not telling anyone not to use OneDrive. We all make that sort of decision for ourselves.
All I'm saying is that OneDrive hosed me in a terrible way, so I'm no longer willing to risk using it. Particularly since it doesn't really address any need I have and if I did have such a need, there are better tools (for me) available.
The other dangerous tools you've mentioned haven't ever burned me.
https://i.imgur.com/LZGEpGt.png
Strangely poetic!
> It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations.
Do you really not consider the first to be an example of the second?
> Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them.
Shift+Del asks for confirmation. I would expect OneDrive to do at least that much before deleting files off the local machine, even if they're recoverable.
I think too many people got the impression that I'm defending OD and can't get out of that trench. My point is that a generic tool being able to do dangerous things isn't a high enough bar to say don't use it (often). A tool doing being able to do dangerous things in the manner I described above is a completely different devil. The "how" you end up doing a dangerous thing is what should be punished.
I want to be able to do whatever I want with my computer and my data and not have someone define what's "too dangerous" for me to use. But what happened here wasn't what the users wanted, or could reasonably expect to happen. That's the key.
> Shift+Del asks for confirmation
I'm sure OD also asked for some confirmation. By that time it's too late, you're confirming what you think will happen, not what will actually happen. When you confirm shift+del you know what you are confirming. When you confirm OD's dialog you're confirming under misleading assumptions.
Use `rm -r` and just press Delete if you want to have protection.
This is where OD failed by MS's design, it didn't operate consistently with almost any other computer tool, and didn't document the behavior properly in a way that the user can take advantage of the knowledge.
It's worse, because it runs without the users explicit knowledge or consent, and it lacks the implicit guardrails `rm -rf` has (in that most people who use Linux and the terminal are at least literate).
For example, if a user does not actively change the save location, at least for office apps, the default behavior is to save to onedrive.
The user fucked up. Sadly HN even gobbles this shit up with no thought.
How about no. I dropped some important documents on a few flash drives that I have lying around.
I want all the people at Microsoft, Google and more that are involved in such a scheme/scam to know that a dedicated place is already booked for them in hell...
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.
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.)
I put the effort in to move off gmail, was worth it. Now gmail is just my spam inbox
It was in my history? Check
Recent documents? Check
Visible in the file explorer? Check
Desktop? No dice
Try to open it... 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. Please believe me!
Wait, a URL? I bet it's OneDrive. Fix it, after having to de-select "backup" multiple times and then click "submit".
Pathetic excuse for a monopoly.
So basically tons of Windows related websites tell this infallible little trick if a user gets a Windows BSOD (Blue Screen of Death): Reboot!
Invariably, the reboot causes the 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 (till they worked), but very complex to maintain 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.
What happened is exactly what it suggests. OneDrive migration doesn't just copy your files over. While the migration is occurring, the operating system is re-mapping them all to a cloud URL and/or deleting them entirely.
I know, it's as crazy as it sounds and your bet was my bet at first as well.
But consider the alternative... :(
FTR, I've used it and usually configure to explicitly only sync a single directory.
It's insane to me that there isn't a simple, GUI-based app that provides this utility in a clean, straightforward way. Basically just "dropbox, but let me set the destination to another drive on my PC/network/VPN (or a 'repo', for 'advanced' users)".
Just a plain interface that shows me my files and allows me to say "I want this folder to be backed up to here, here, and here". I can do that manually for every folder I want backed up, but other users may opt to backup a whole drive or whatever, depending on need.
Seems like a slam dunk. Frustrating that I don't know enough about the footguns with backups (duplications, cpu limiting, etc) to just write the app myself, but I have been looking at what the eframe and rustic libraries can do together. Feels imminently do-able by someone who has a lot of experience with backups. But maybe it's even passable do-able by someone who just knows what he wants.
Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.
I can understand why people might want to backup entire drives, or to backup OS content minimally, but my use-case is to just pick a few folders and only have those backed up. Not to an external drive, but to internal ones and network ones.
That's the tool I'm looking for. While Time Machine can exclude everything but the folders to backup, it doesn't seem to be able to back them up with different cadences or rules about content limits or whatever else. It's all or nothing. I'm just not sure it provides what I'm looking for.
The UI is a little cumbersome for me, personally, but it does seem at least straightforward enough for me to understand what the intentions are.
ETA: Welp, that didn't last long. A service running in the background that exposes an "insecure" url for a browser to then open as the only means for GUI interaction with the app is not a great recommendation for everyday users. It looks like it has all the features, but I'm looking for a user experience. CLIs provide the features. I'd like an app, not a service running a webserver. Shudder the thought of just shoving the front end in an electron app, but even that would be better than this for casual users.
No doubt this has gotten more "seamless" in recent years than it was at first.
The exact definition of "deceptive trade practices".
does everyone hate it?
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.
I don’t rate the apps I use unless other than to give it 1 star for doing something I hate. My banking app’s transaction search doesn’t work at all, so it gets 1 star. But 1.9M ratings resulted in a 5 star average — who are the freaks giving their banking app 5 stars and why?
looks like millions for my banking app (Chase) rating 5 stars
do you really not understand why people might do things different from you?
hundreds of thousands and millions of fake reviews. it’s all manipulation!
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.
But it isn't the students' fault, I guess they are still learning how to use computers.
This is purely an IT Administration fiasco. The IT admin should simply exclude the repository folders/paths from OneDrive. Or make everyone to save non-code documents to a separate shared network path, which is a storage drive that gets automatically backed up daily.
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-remove-a-folder-from-o...
Arguably it's already the best desktop/laptop OS. Hopefully within a few years it can be the most popular desktop OS.
Then again... maybe this year is the year of the linux desktop...
I'd really love if some vendors would license Pop from System76 for more, broader hardware support. I think it's just about the best out of the box experience in Linux for most users.
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.
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.
Also - lots of people are used to it and habits die hard, regardless of technical merit etc.
Not necessarily. I don't use Microsoft on my personal machines, but my employer forces me to use it at work.
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.
I work on a Mac, I run servers on Linux, I game on Windows.
Flawless experience on non-nvidia hardware though.
Either way, only serves to further the point that Linux is in a pretty good place and the experience should only be better on more stable options.
It's just an optional update whenever I remember to check for one.
Current Windows gaming experience is almost like a console, just play and forget, (if you just use your machine for that).
Another potential issue is that I have games in all the major launchers (and a GamePass subscription), and the only one that works reasonably well on Linux is Steam.
Didn't even need to download steam.
Absolutely shocked me how smooth the out-of-box experience was compared to even Windows 10.
To my further surprise, I found my game library's compatibility on Bazzite was stronger than Windows 10 somehow. (Some old games like Moonbase Commander don't launch on Windows 10)
Personally, only TFT is a blocker for me, and you can get an inferior version working on linux, but it only takes you playing one of those games for it to be a blocker.
My guess is that most DRM'ed games won't work right, but they often don't work right under Windows either.
> but they often don't work right under Windows either.
This is certainly untrue. Them working often is the entire reason why Windows is the "gaming OS".
Even live-service games are less of a hassle than they used to be. BDO works well, Genshin works with occasionally having to update Proton, and the new shiny Where Winds Meet worked for me from the first day (never even tried it on Windows :P)
I think in the last 6 months, I've dual-booted for pretty much these things:
* To install a new motherboard's RGB-tweak utility because it doesn't work right in OpenRGB yet. Ran it once to pick settings, then it seemed to write to NVRAM since it's been stuck that way now.
* To use ham radio programming software that was clearly written by a single hobbyist and I didn't expect to work on anything but happy-path Windows systems.
* To try a weird specialty keyboard with a nonstandard card-reader (most of them just appear as normal HID keyboards, this one was a custom USB endpoint which apparently emulated a serial device with the right software. In the end, it didn't work well in Windows either-- the software was apparently mostly Win7-and-below.
* To deal with an old scanner that the vendor provides a Linux software package for, but only as a binary .deb that didn't seem to work well on Void. (Problem solved by picking up a used scanner explicitly supported by SANE for $10 at the Goodwill)
Might need a little update to bring it up to date.
Disclosure: I fear technology and my daddy is not rich.
Macs are as much about the hardware than the software, and the OS is just another Unix variant. Much closer to Linux/BSD than Windows.
I like tech (no fear, I've been coding for 41 years at this point), but I don't like configuration, I'm a programmer, not IT, and also I heavily lean to getting shit done, so I prefer tools that don't get too much in my way.
I abandoned Linux on the desktop after I lost a battle with Linux audio. I can't freaking believe there's not a single thing that unifies everything, it's such a pain in the ass to setup right.
On notebooks it's a lost battle due to issues with power management that require way more fiddling that I'm willing to invest into.
Funny enough - I have less problems with audio on Pop/Bazzite than my Mac (where my headset mic can be muted by flipping up - but is unable to unmute without power cycling the headset) or Windows (which cannot ever remember which device I want to use for which app).
I held off on switching to desktop Linux because of horror stories on places like HN. But it’s seriously not been my lived experience. I can only think that maybe these were problems 5+ years ago - or it’s folks that went with super customized Arch installs or something.
I mostly just use my webcam's mic, despite my headphones being better so I can leave my headset on bluetooth/stereo.
To properly support Pro Audio you have to completely switch the audio stack to JACK - which I also used in MacOS a few years ago because Apple's audio stack wasn't up to the task as well.
Coworkers with wired headphones (also on Ubuntu, but I don't know if they switched to pipewire) tend to have problems regularly.
More and more it seems people don't even find it necessary for that.
I'm "the Linux friend" for a lot of my friends, and over the last year-ish a surprising number of them have asked about advice for switching to Linux. I've helped four people attempt the switch, and three out of the four have stuck with Linux so far.
Most issues on Linux come from fighting the community, which historically Nvidia has done a lot of.
Apex Legends at least was running fine on Steam Deck prior to november 2024 when they instituted this change, and I can tell you from personal experience it had very little impact on cheaters, which was their excuse for the change (supposedly most cheaters were connecting via Linux clients).
I always find this so hard to believe, mainly because the majority of players are on Windows, which means that the market for cheats is there and statistically most likely to happen there.
I just don’t play games by devs that snub Linux. There are many to choose from.
Granted, I could get that on Macintosh. But while their fans like to claim that Apple's engineering is all about usability, that hasn't been true for quite some time. It's now become a status/elitism thing (see, e.g., yesterday's conversation about Tahoe icons). And their UX model is very contrary to my way of thinking about things.
They've had a revolutionary upgrade in their masking tools. ML models power automated, smart mask creation. For example, on a landscape photo I can get, with just a couple of clicks, separate masks for sky, water, land, foliage, structures, and natural ground. The power that this gives me to edit my photos is amazing. To the best of my knowledge, Darktable and others have nothing approaching this.
Not that its perfect when 100% automated but it takes a fraction the time to adjust things towards perfection, no one misses doing it by hand.
Rapidraw does try to compete some having ML based masking but I gotta agree most the open source solutions have been lagging behind bigtime.
While Gimp and Krita are very useful and even usable for a lot of people... that doesn't mean it's a suitable replacement for the Adobe products. Some will get Affinity running with Wine... frankly it would be nice if there was an "easy gutton" to doing a lot of this. I'm not sure about the legalities of copying actual MS dll's from Windows for use with Wine even... even if yoou have a license, as I'm not a lawyer, which can impact the ability to make it easier to do/use.
It would be nice if more software at least got tested to run on Wine/Proton with closer to first party support. Bridging the gap between a full Linux version, and something that can at least run in Linux.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMJNEFHj8b8&t=287s
even this has gone away for me, exited first with Bazzite and am now on CachyOS. Still got a debloated Windows11 on a different SSD for when friends want to play games with kernel-level anticheat or other bs.
feels good to be free of Microsoft. work on a Mac, game on Linux, phones run Android.
yup...at first i thought, "at work i have to manage rpm-ostree servers, so why not use the same tech at home?", well, because the tech is freaking buggy, annoying and deprecated already (imagemode/bootc).
Bazzite also had strange issues with the XBOX controllers i use, those issues went away with CachyOS. in the end it doesn't matter that much, on both i use(d) KDE Plasma. GF also uses the PC with her own useraccount to play her games. overall very satisfied, can't complain.
don't lynch me, decided to go for the pretty standard instead of Sway or Hyprland, as i feared that this would bring more issues with gaming. maybe that's an irrational fear, who knows.I'm trying to understand the "deprecated already" in your first paragraph. (All I know about rpm-ostree is from using and adminning a distro that relies on rpm-ostree. I.e., I don't know much.)
Here is my guess as to what you mean: Bazzite could continue to use imagemode and bootc while replacing rpm-ostree with something better, and maybe you'll give Bazzite another look after that happens.
they're different technologies with bootc being the new kid. bootc means "bootable containers". rpm-ostree has not much to do with containers and is more like managing your OS with git-logic.
forget about "imagemode", that's the marketing-term RedHat uses for bootc.
i imagine bazzite will migrate to bootc sooner or later, but of course that requires a new way to build and ship it.
The first paragraph of the home page of https://universal-blue.org/ ends with "We produce a diverse set of continuously delivered operating system images using bootc."
Another author explains: "Bazzite utilizes bootc to manage the base image for your system, pin specific versions, and perform rollbacks when needed. For systems with customized software via layered packages, rpm-ostree becomes essential for installing, upgrading, and managing those additions."
"Why do this? Each tool is chosen for its strengths: bootc offers robust control over base images, ensuring that your core system remains unchanged unless you explicitly update it, while rpm-ostree provides flexibility for managing additional software without compromising the integrity of the atomic base. This separation helps maintain stability and security. Bazzite uses bootc for managing system images and rpm-ostree for adding layered packages."
Source: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/how-to-manage-bazzite...
Of course, nothing I wrote contradicts your assertion that rpm-ostree "is freaking buggy, annoying", but it does cast doubt in my mind on your belief that bootc can by itself completely replace rpm-ostree.
Thanks for your reply.
Apple give you a middle finger with a "Something went wrong" or just spins forever. No information whatsoever on what the problem is and how you could possibly debug it. Compete lack of tooling to help with that too.
Probably my favourite example was when it was giving me an error message of "A device is using too much power, try unplugging and replugging it". Which device? Which port? What is "too much"? HA, FUCK YOU. I spent hours trying to debug this (so there is a tool that can give you power use per USB device, but it's a point in time one). In the end rewired everything because it was just impossible to discover what the hell was its problem. Another fun one was trying to extend my macOS screen to an iPad, where the button just wasn't there. Why? What was I missing? Who knows.
Another fun one: “Updates are available. Do you want to install them?” What updates? What software is getting updates? What do they fix? No information, just a notification asking you whether you want to install vague updates.
Valve saw exactly this scenario, because you're right: Windows isn't good for stability any more. Windows isn't good for driver compatibility anymore. Windows isn't good for being easy to do your own thing. It's only good for gaming...
So: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
Amiga users have been here before.
Otherwise, spot-on to my MO
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.
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.