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.
Years ago Microsoft had its OneNote Notebooks as proper files, you could move and copy them and such. Now it’s nearly impossible to get your hands on a “tangible” file using this software.
During that transition- from usable to shit, I made the mistake of uploading my notebook, with all of my uears of course studies (college, professional certifications, etc) into onedrive. That way it could be backed up! A year later I moved my files again into a different system, moving away from OD. They were MY files after all.
What I didn’t know was that Microsoft had moved my Notebook somewhere else into their cloud, on my behalf, and changed my Notebook file to a shortcut/pointer object. There was no indication it was a shortcut as with other documents (the little arrow) on windows. It looked just exactly like the original file.
Well when I tried to open this “file” I got the rudest awakening: Microsoft couldn’t find the “linked” notebook. “What fucking linked notebook?” Apparently, when I moved my “file” (shortcut) out of overdrive, they saw that as a deletion and DELETED the now referenced file they helpfully moved for me.
All of this without ever a single notification; Microsoft deleted years of critical notes with no recourse for recovery. It was just gone.
Ass holes.
Shit! I’m soon to go Linux and now there’s one more thing for me ro figure out then. I have some stuff (not a lot, but some important stuff) on OneNote, lucky me that I made the switch to Obsidian a couple of years ago.
+1 for Obsidian. Copy-paste to other pc = immediate access without setup. Plug & play. Also free.
Obsidian isn’t open source, if OP or anyone else is concerned about that.
I use git to sync my md notes instead of obsidians paid sync service also. I’ll never go back to proprietary non-text based notes files.
If you self host, go Joplin. I was unimpressed with obsidian’s ability to use the same notebook in multiple systems easily, and Joplin lets me easily sync my notebook between systems using a docker container I host as the sync server.
Recent ones I’ve been trying on Linux:
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Logseq (Markdown only)
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Flatnotes (Markdown & WYSIWYG)
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MarkItUp (Markdown & WYSIWYG)
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Trilium (Markdown & WYSIWYG)
By far, I’m enjoying Trilium over the others. Trilium can do LaTeX, while Flatnotes and MarkItUp can’t (don’t remember if Logseq can). That coupled with What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) note taking - the kind of text editing like Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, or Google Docs - makes thing work just like OneNote. Plus, one of the things I was really looking forward to seeing in a Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS) was a graphical/node map view of all my notes, which again Trilium does.
I’m actually considering making one of my old laptops a perma-server that I can run Trilium on so I can access it on both my new laptop, my phone, or pretty much any other device with an Internet connection.
Last thing I’ll say is that it doesn’t hurt to try everything and see what sticks!!! Before settling down on something permanent that works for you, that is.
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If you do ever end up in that situation again, (or someone else is,) you can download the notebook by moving it into a folder in OneDrive. Then go to the web and use the option to download the folder. That will zip up the folder, with the real one drive files inside.
You’ll still need to find an app to import them into your new note taker though.
I’ve had something similar. It’s absolutely infuriating and shows the complete lack of respect they have for the users.
Linux welcomes all refugees
I moved one old laptop to Linux over about a year ago, and committed to an effort to actually make it do the things I wanted to do, like play games, and run Windows-only tools or find viable replacements. To say it went well is an understatement. Within a few months I had switched every computer I owned, and I’m never looking back again.
Granted, I was already quite familiar with Linux on the server side. This was not my first attempt to use Linux on the desktop, either. But it was my last, because I’m never going back to Windows ever again now.
Yup this was me back in early October saving an old box I wanted to keep around as a media server.
Before the month’s end all my computers are on one Linux distro or another.
Valve made a big move when they started their Proton project. That was a key compatibility layer for a more wide-spread adoption.
It was shocking at how fast it went from ‘you can tweak it to run most things’ to ‘I don’t even check to see if the game works anymore before I buy it’.
I just made the switch and probably for good this time, and Steam just working was a HUGE moment for me. I opened up a guide thinking I’d need it, but I just downloaded Steam, didn’t change any settings, and could start playing.
At this point, Linux is more of a “just works” experience than Windows 11 was.
I also made the switch with no plan of looking back, and the only thing was that some odd interaction between the integrated and dedicated GPU caused the Steam UI to not work. The fix was disabling “Hardware accelerated Web” something something, and I was playing shortly after downloading the first game.
Oh yeah, I remember hitting that snag in an earlier attempt. I managed to do it, but it was definitely a point where Windows worked more easily than Linux. Glad to hear it’s gotten easier!
They are so lucky microslop auto installs the Windows Backup app … oh wait …
Years ago I tried to use the WIndows backup app to back up my system disk to a tape streamer. (Magnetic tapes were and still are useful as long term backup.) Result was a backup you coulndn’t recover. I don’t know what exactly was on the tape but it couldn’t be read back. Tried the same with a harddisk, same result. I’ve since then used various external backup tools that had no problem creating backups that you actually can recover from, never looked back at MS backup. You just can’t trust Microsoft to store any important data. You can only be sure they’ll fuck up sooner or later and take things in you own hands.
Happened to me at work where they force us to use Windows 11. I had turned on the autosave feature on a Word document I was working on. Little did I know this meant it stopped saving the changes locally and started saving them on a OneDrive copy. I then worked all day on that file.
The next day I notice the file on OD, find it odd that it is there so I delete it because I want nothing to do with OD. I then open the local word file I worked on all day yesterday and realize that none of the work I did the day prior was saved.
I figured out what happened and fortunately the file was still in the recycle bin. But fuck that whole system to begin with.
At work they forbade the use of one drive. It literally was consuming hundreds of terabytes of data and many more on bandwidth because they activated auto sync on thousands of laptops after an update without telling anyone. It was synching entire hard drives of confidential information without our consent. By the time our IT realized, they were trying to charge us for it (web do have SharePoint on azure). Turns out there’s some you can disable by group policy, but the shit is so embedded that it cannot be completely turned off. So they are just instructing workers how to avoid it now and warning everyone that, although we do have a quota per install of one drive, any loss of data is the worker liability as we are being told not to use it. Microsoft is such a joke.
We are facing similar issues with copilot by the way.
Its been years since being able to save files on my laptop hard drive for work. Its all onedrive. The company uses it as protection - if the laptop is stolen theres no proprietary data on the drive. It also ensures if my laptop breaks all my work is intact.
The autosave feature is also linked to allowing several people to work on documents simultaneously. This is probably related to forcing onedrive use. You can share links to the files, and being able to edit simultaneously is useful. If you turn off autosave like I tend to do sometimes then when others open the file at the same time you all end up with your own version and cant see what the others are doing.
At home I use linux. I got fed up ages ago with MS stealing my files.
The thing that pisses me off with the auto sync option is that it’s just not how a lot of files that we have are used
I don’t want to see a file with 10 different versions in the past week all because somebody opened it and didn’t modify it and closed it. I want to open a file, find out what I need to, and close it while knowing that I did not make any changes to that file.
sure, this problem could be avoided somewhat by managing user permissions, but oh guess what that’s a fucking pain in the ass the way Microsoft has that set up too
Go beat your IT department with hammers. I have roughly a decade in IT with primarily Windows in our environment. There’s no reason for it to suck so bad in a corporate environment. They can disable it entirely very easily, or make it work amazingly well with some effort.
My workplace:
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We redirect/sync My Documents and My Pictures to OneDrive seamlessly. If it’s saved in either of those, autosave is on and it’s the same file locally and on onedrive. Files saved follow to any machine. Viewable in explorer always, actually downloaded locally on the fly as needed. Obvious overlaid icon on every file to indicate if it’s synced, syncing, or not available locally (when you’re offline and can’t connect to one drive). You can right click files and folders to easily adjust if they’re always downloaded up to date locally or just on demand.
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If there are any conflicts it can’t auto-merge (usually only non-office docs) it saves them with the source computer name appended to the end of the file name so you have each version available, and it pops up a notification that stays until it is manually dismissed, so you know it happened.
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If for some reason you’re working on a document outside of the synced folders, office programs do not default to saving in one drive, they default to where the document was opened from or to “My Documents” for new docs, so shit doesn’t get silently moved on you. I can and have had the same doc opened on multiple machines at once, made edits on each, and it worked just like live collaboration with other users.
It doesn’t have to suck, and it’s also easily disableable entirely in enterprise environments if your IT doesn’t want to configure it well. We kept it entirely disabled from our environment until we had our config planned and thoroughly tested with a pilot group for a few months before we let it hit the company as a whole.
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I work for a huge organization and my local IT guys have their hands bound. I couldn’t even make a ripple in that ocean even if I tried.
I’m sorry, that sucks. It really only takes about ten minutes to search up the settings to turn off the saving redirection in Office programs and toss it in the default Group Policy settings, but I’m sure that at a huge org that would end up stuck in absurd change review hell that IT folk seem to try and avoid.
the thing is… you shouldn’t have to “search up the settings to turn off the saving redirection in Office programs and toss it in the default Group Policy settings”. cloud shit in windows and ms office needs to be optional, and explicitly opt in
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I dont get why you’d avoid using onedrive in a work environment.
Because they don’t know how to use it properly, or intentionally use it wrong and complain when they lose data.
I’m not going to defend one drive in the slightest, because it irritates the shit out of me. But reading through this thread is giving me flashbacks to end user support and listening to old people not understanding why they’re causing their own problems. Like the number of times I’ve seen ‘it appeared in one drive and I didn’t like it so I deleted it and now my data is gone, what the hell’ both in this thread and irl is nuts…
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.
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 🙄
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’re the kind of person that says gems like “Computers don’t make mistakes, sir”, Arent you?
cool
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.
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?
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.
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 don’t know how to use such black magic.
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.
After using TimeShift, I find Deja Dup better than TimeShift.
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.
I know why. Because they were using OneDrive.
It’s infuriating. They silently move all your files to their cloud and you don’t notice. Then one day they tell you that you have filled your cloud quota and they want more money. Switching to local only is, by design, a huge pain that tends to go wrong.
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.
The problem is most users are unaware their files were being stored on the cloud in the first place. I had a friend who kept downloading mods on his computer only to have them not show up if he was offline. Turns out it was stored on their servers and not locally. All due to Microsoft making sure they stay as little transparent as possible and not warn users that their files are automatically being stored to onedrive.
We need heavy regulation against these sociopaths before it’s too late. This is only going to get worse.
Honestly most of the issues with OneDrive are from one setting:
Files On-Demand - it’s turned on by default. It uploads all the files in the drive to the cloud and then deletes them from the local computer. Its absolutely, fucking stupid and should be banned.
Why handle files? Let big bro Microsoft handle them for you.
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.
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.
What is a “real” Microsoft account?
If you use Windows with a local account and unlinked to OneDrive, yes.
What does that mean. A local account?
That’s what I said. A… local account. I’m confused. A local account is an account that only works with your PC, a regular user account not related to any web service.
I see. Thanks. I have an outlook account attached to my pc so this does NOT apply to me and I’m apparently in danger of this occurring.
Its because they are using it.
People often don’t know that they have a choice. It enables itself.
