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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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
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…