Why MIcrosoft can’t develop a good desktop app when they have a huge amount of money and loads of staff. Not to mention owning the operating system a majority of people use, meaning the app, syncing, backing up, etc. can be super optimised for it without any fuss for using workarounds. NO MS, PUTTING ALL MY FILES INTO A “OneDrive” FOLDER IS NOT A GOOD IDEA. WHY IS THERE TWO OF THEM??? “OneDrive” and “OneDrive - [org name]”??? WHAT??? AND YOUR TASKBAR ICON THING FOR ONEDRIVE IS ANNOYING. WHY CAN’T I QUIT ONEDRIVE WITHOUT OPENING THE MENU???
Thankfully I switched to more competent cloud providers. pCloud is pretty good, they just sync your files. No stupid “moving all your folders into a pcloud folder and making two of them one of which is empty for some reason”. Super duper simple. And pcloud definitely has many times less budget and staff than MS. Jottacloud is also great, pretty similar to pcloud in that it only syncs files. WHY ARE THESE MUCH SMALLER COMPANIES DOING A WAY BETTER JOB THAN MS???
The reason MS puts all the main folders in onedrive is because users are tech illiterate. Most dont understand they need to place files into a special directory to be swished away to the cloud service. I know, because I’ve done the same thing when i setup my parents pc with linux… no matter how many times i explain “just place the files in this folder to automatically synced” all their files just up in the standard home directories never to be synced. I ended up just symbolic linking the home directory to one in the cloud directory. >_>
Now how MS managed to even fucked that up… well thats a whole other story.
that makes sense…but why is there two of them? That’s really weird. And I don’t think they want you to quit OneDrive…
Also, since they own the operating system (Windows), they could easily just sync the folders directly. (Documents, Pictures, Desktop, Music, and Videos) That’s where most people put their files in, so why not just sync that? Why move everything into a special OneDrive directory with all the issues that comes with that?
TRY AGAIN IN THREE DAYS
now to be fair, you can organize your onedrive too
I don’t want to.
I recently wasted multiple evenings going through this with my partner’s photos on both OneDrive and Google. It was a nightmare, trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.
I ended up doing a full backup from the cloud to an external drive and unplugging it just to be sure, then carefully using the awful web interfaces to delete a bunch of photos and videos from the cloud after deactivating all the auto-backup “options”, which is apparently the only way to do it without also wiping your local media. There doesn’t seem to be any way to do it while using the “service” normally on the device; any attempt to delete from the cloud will also delete your local copy.
People have called me paranoid for seeking out and removing/deactivating these “services” with extreme prejudice on my own devices, but this experience was even worse than I’d imagined.
Yeah, such a service, deleting your files!
I ran into a fun one where both google and Xiaomi backed up my photos, that was a nightmare to save and clean out. They would write back deleted files (hey look we restored your list files!) and the other service would back them up again lol.
It’s almost as it’s not meant to be useful but a trap to fall into eh.
trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.
…and that’s Microsoft’s entire game. Get old people to pay more for higher tiers of storage because your mom doesn’t understand why she has no storage left for the family picnic photos.
Linux, people… Linux!
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And that’s the point where I’ll go off the grid
Buy a ThinkPad, download Wikipedia, print as many books as you can, spend 6 months binding those books, die from dysentery or almost starve to death in winter.
This is also my retirement plan.
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Man, with the Linux users on one side and daddy Microsoft high on the cloud, C: don’t get no respect!
Bro, I had just reinstalled windows and I moved my backup folder straight to my desktop, then left. I get an alert like two hours later saying my onedrive is full. What? Go back and the copy failed. I can excuse it automatically backing stuff up because people don’t understand anything, but to cancel my local transfer is insane. I was livid. OneDrive is cancer.
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No one should have to do that stupid shit, it should be opt in only. The only reason for this model is to trick idiots into buying a subscription they never wanted or needed.
Windows® Just Works™
“But I don’t want to learn how to set things up, I just want it to work, now how do I set up this windows pc?”
Its not like Microsoft advertises this - they explicitly obfuscate and make things opt out
Yeah, it’s very easy… as long as it’s working, which it is not, at all.
The fact that it’s opt-out and not opt-in says a lot about windows.
I guess it’s more popular to hate than to learn things…
Sure is, look at all that hate this little guy 🐧 gets for example
This is one thing I still can’t seem to rid myself of with Windows 10. Is there something in the Windows 10 Pro group policy thing I can do to send OneDrive back to hell from whence it came? I’ve only managed to get my files to save to a directory not controlled by it, however the quick links to media folders still point to the one drive folder even after manually changing them numerous times.
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I managed to kill it on my home PC years ago.
I’m confused. Are you logged in to OneDrive?
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loathe OneDrive. It’s the flakiest, most unreliable piece of software in MS’s current end-user-focused stable…
…but it still needs you to log in. If you log out from OneDrive it does nothing. It’s a separate login from the Windows login, too, if you’ve used one of those to install Windows.
I genuinely haven’t used Win10 in enough time I don’t recall if it gave you more notifications to re-enable it, but after refusing to log in and taking OneDrive out of my startup tasks I don’t think it’s come up again on any of my Windows devices.
The login is now unskippable and part of the OS setup.
No, you’re thinking about the Microsoft Account login (which still has workarounds but whatever). OneDrive needs to have its own separate login, in case you, like me, have a separate account for work or need to have multiple One Drive accounts or if you have paid One Drive, 365 and whatnot.
So you can absolutely log in to Windows with a MS account and log in to One Drive with your work account… or not log in at all and just not have it running, which is what I do.
I have installed Win11 on a new computer build this year. I promise I’m looking at my system tray and there is zero One Drive icons on it. No One Drive folder in my Windows file explorer, either.
I really doubt you do not have a OneDrive folder at all, since the default My Documents location is
C:\users\<user>\OneDrive\MyDocumentsRegardless. Even if you completely skip the OneDrive shit at install.
Sorry, but no. My current path is
C:\Users\<user>\DocumentsI literally just navigated to my documents folder in a explorer window and copy pasted the path here. I swear I’m not making this up.
I’m pretty sure that these days syncing your documents folder with OneDrive is two separate opt-ins: one to log in to OneDrive at all and one to select whether to sync your libraries.
I am not going to set up a VM just to check this, but I have multiple Windows machines in operation on Win10 and Win11 at home right now and none of them are syncing my libraries. That ranges from five year old Win10 installs to Win11 installs as recent as a couple of months ago.
For the record, I don’t think you’re crazy either. There’s definitely something baked into the install we’re doing differently or some version difference or whatever. It’s surprisingly hard to suss this out at this point, since there’s a fairly complex set of could-backed choices, first time setup choices and maybe even regional changes, I’m not sure. The one interesting, kinda shocking takeaway is how differently our machines can be set up based on probably some checkmark we each set up differently once ages ago or whatever the hell this is.
Well I’ve never purposely logged into One Drive but my “Documents” and “Pictures” folders’ paths have been inside of an One Drive folder every time since at least win10.
The last time I installed win11 one of the very first things I did was move all the default libraries out of one drive.
During setup before answering any pointless questions by microsoft press press Shift + F10 and type
Start ms-cxh:localonly
Enjoy your offline account.
I’ve already given up on windows by now, but I’ve heard that trick no longer works.
Can confirm. I have never had W10P bug me about OneDrive. I don’t have, nor will I ever have an account for microshit. Local user only. All files stored locally and have never been promoted to do otherwise.
I don’t even have a login for it, let alone try to use it. What it has done, however, has made itself the standard “My Documents” folder in the user profile. I am not using it for anything, I have that all on a totally separate drive and mostly everything correctly points to the new destination I have for My Documents, My Games, My Videos, etc.
However, I can not get the Quick Links on the left side of an explorer window to stick to the new destination. It keeps reverting back to the OneDrive folder within the user folder so using them just sends me to an empty folder.
See, then you fell for a dark pattern, because I refused to use it on first boot and there is no One Drive folder in this brand new computer I’m currently using at all. It isn’t the standard My Documents folder, it doesn’t have a folder at all and the application icon isn’t on my system tray.
That’s why I was asking about the Win10 install being different, but I’ve installed Win 11 twice this year, once in a computer for personal use that currently doesn’t have any One Drive folder at all and one for work where One Drive is logged in to a work account (along with Office 365) and it only syncs that work folder, not the personal folders, photos and whatnot. You can absolutely have a Windows (11, anyway) install with no One Drive synced to anything at all, or even running.
It sucks that Windows designs its install process as a dark pattern-ladden attempt to get you to sign up for crap, but you can reject all of it. Maybe I do it enough I have the habit and I underestimate how hard it is to choose what you actually want. I guess that’s the equivalent to having a working Windows 98 key memorized in the early 2000s.
Windows 11 finally allows you to simply uninstall OneDrive. Before that you had to do weird registry hacks, that often broke something :-/
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I love my jobs implementation of onedrive. It copies files from my hardrive, erases the local copy, and then loses the remote version.
Just activate the option to keep a local copy, right click the folder your files are in and choose “keep local copy”
“your administrator has restricted your ability to change this setting”
Thanks! It was “Always keep on this device” but I didn’t know that was an option. I was able to fully download a folder where individual items could not be retrieved. Awesome!
Apple lets you do this with ebooks, then you turn off iCloud sync thinking it’ll just keep all the local copies you just individually downloaded…
nah deletes ‘em all
You say this like it makes sense that this functionality isn’t the default. Why the fuck does that make sense to you?!
The idea is that you can have more data online than you can fit on your computer.
It makes sense for SharePoint when there can easily be enough data to cause space problems on employee computers.
It doesn’t really make sense for it to be the default for personal OneDrives though.
It also allows IT depts to deploy thin clients for a fraction of the cost of a full desktop (along with the crap performance for actual multitasking).
You’re the only one who talked about if it makes sense or not, calm down and go for a walk
It is the default, but some IT people decide to set shit up a particular way that makes things stupid, and some even lock those settings for some dumbass reason…
Microsoft ate my homework
I died with this hahahahha
My end user had three documents.
- In oneDrive, localised to Spanish
- In oneDrive, still in English
- The actual document folder
Guess where they put all the files that I wanted to be put in /documents?
Undesirables = tech ceos
Something, something, Linux, something, something, autism.
dd -of /dev/null
Almost all the new hires at work save shit to one drive and teams and it’s incredibly annoying to locate anything. Just save it to the dang shared drive.
I had to force people in our lab to use the shared drive, they were all so resistant to it for some reason. Lo and behold they love it now because its easy to share stuff and you can use any computer to get it.
