OneDrive has stopped working on non-NTFS drives
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
As a long-term OneDrive (SkyDrive, Windows Live Mesh, FolderShare) user, it has been really disappointing to see features come, go, then come back. I can't upgrade operating systems or even update the app without fear of losing critical features.
For example, being able to transparently access networked (not locally downloaded) files used to be super easy, then it went away, and is now apparently coming back.
Similarly, Windows Live Mesh had really good versioning, a really useful remote access service, and really cool collaboration tools. Then it went away and has never been replaced.
OneDrive used to have 25Gb storage for free; that was a really good deal. Then it went to unlimited storage for Office users, but then they stopped that for no good reason.
tl;dr I'm not going to be a OneDrive customer for much longer. Microsoft makes it really hard to be a fan of their products. :(
You can't stretch the definition of unlimited. There is literaly no amount that would stretch it. If you advertise unlimited storage, you are bending the truth, since there is no such thing as unlimited disk space. I don't see how anyone can blame the data hoarders here. Where I live, if you advertise for something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for it. I just don't see why they feel the need to lie to customers like that.
No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. There are maybe a handful of organizations outside of Microsoft that have a non-laughable chance of estimating A) cost of online storage to microsoft B) number of users C) distribution of storage used by their userbase D) cost of bandwidth E) typical bandwidth profile of users F) how much money Microsoft is willing to spend on storage as a loss leader.
And then there is the un-estimateable wildcard: G) what number will "sound too big" to sysadmins and/or PMs once they see it on their metrics dashboard.
"Unlimited" is a scam to avoid vocalizing the secret maximum and hoping that users have more conservative estimates of the secret maximum than it's actual value.
And there is a huge incentive for users to guess conservativly at the maximum, because as soon as one person doesn't everyone else will blame them for "shitting in the pool and getting the whole thing canned"
I don't think that matters.
> "Unlimited" is a scam
Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of. I have unlimited checking and it's not a scam but there are obvious limits, if I wrote a million checks for 1 cent they would either close my account or change the terms. Writing a million checks is not a reasonable use case though, that would be me shitting in the pool.
Unlimited SOUNDS better than any given number because it says you wont have to worry about usage. If you said 5TB of usage this might have the same connotations for most users however it doesn't communicate this fact as well.
However once you start playing games with language. Saying one thing in large print and the exact opposite in the fine print or depending on what different people think is reasonable it becomes harder to define what is permissible.
The former: if everyone just played along and used things reasonably we would still be benefiting from cheap storage.
The latter: stop playing games, "unlimited" is an unacceptable lie and we will push you into admitting it.
It devalues the products of people that aren't bullshitting you. Say with fake-unlimited the "real limit" is 4TB before they start terminating you, but a different provider provides 5TB of capacity.
Because the former is allowed to outright lie, there is no way for the latter to effectively communicate that they are in fact offering a better product, instead they too have to make a bullshit "fake unlimited" claim to compete. Now because nobody has to actually back their claims with anything, they are infact massively incentivised to cut the "real storage" limits, because it will cut their costs, and they can still keep making the same claims.
Its a market for lemons[1] race to the bottom, and everyone loses, producer and consumer because scamming liars cannot be reliably assessed beforehand. So consumers lose faith in the entire market segment, and providers offering actual legitimate services become unsustainable.
Here's what a sane person would do: retain the 10GB. Disallow any further upload while usage is above 100% (Dropbox doed this).
No, this isn't what Microsoft is doing. I used to think one drive was unaffected by all the bs surrounding one drive for business but no. This is a dysfunctional company.
Now that I think about it, it gives me pause about why I should even consider Microsoft technology like dot net core. They'll find some way to screw you over even if it doesn't benefit them to do so.
Edit: sane
Ubuntu is a fine OS.
Oh and I've given up on anything named one drive forever. The time am can't be trusted with anything worth anything.
That's actually just nonsense. Well, of course you can't get a million dollars worth of anything for 5 dollars. But the question is not how many dollars worth of whatever you can get per dollar (that's one dollar, duh), but how much of whatever you can get. And how do you find out how much that is? You look at market prices. You look at what offers there are in the market. Now, if the offers in the market only specify a price, but not what you get for it, you can't actually find out what a unit of whatever is worth.
> just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of.
That's a bullshit comparison. Buffets don't offer unlimited food, they offer as much as you can eat, which is very well constrained by basic human physiology and metabolism. "Storage for your data" has no such inherent limit, but completely depends on what you happen to use it for. "Unlimited" is not the same thing as "limit not specified as an explicit number".
There was some UK court case where the ruling agrees with what you said. However, both then and now I disagree with it.
The reason is it is absolutely wrong in terms of language:
unlimited - without limits
reasonable use - use limited to a reasonable amount
Why not just say there is a 5GB limit? That would be clear, fair and not at all misleading.
I do think that there should be segmented contracts with numerical ranges in to avoid idiots.
In the end, it's a marketing term meaning "we don't arbitrarily set a numeric limit like 50GB", not that it can never possibly under any circumstances run into any kind of physical or practical limit.
Where do you live, and how was OneDrive advertised there? Just curious.
OneDrive and Dropbox have been totally opposite experiences to me, heaven and hell. Also after more than a year with OneDrive I passionately despise it. It truly is Internet Explorer of cloud storages.
2. Work median usage per customer
3. Set new limit below median
4. Profit
Now you don't have to deal with r/datahorder users.
I don't use Windows a lot myself but you're not the first person I hear voicing this concern and postponing updates to avoid risking breaking something critical. This is a very bad precedent for Microsoft to set. At least it'll keep the ransomware and antivirus devs busy.
Such a surprise they started just forcing upgrades..
That was brief and sadly disappeared. However OD is still cheaper than DropBox for 1TB of storage and comes with Office. I'd still mark that as a pretty good deal since most people are required to have Office around.
Anecdotally, OneDrive lost my changes to an essay twice, so I will certainly never use it again.
Otherwise it is purely sync (not backup).
I know because it keeps starting up whenever I transfer files from a Centos Samba share despite every restraining order I've tried to issue.
Of course only the Group Policy editor can stop it and that did't come with the forced Windows 10 Home edition update shoved up my hard drive.
So now, in a complete turning of the tables, I'll have to wait for it to start up and then it will tell me to go f*ck myself.
every one of them with different UI, different settings and never works without a failure. Try sharing a folder between team mates in office365. In dropbox it just appears to every team member. In office365 you need onedrive for busines (the regular onedrive that comes with Windows 10 won't show it) and then it appeas as a sharepoint folder the user. So confusing, So not working.
Since January, OneDrive and OneDrive for Business use the same client and (on o365/SP16FP1) the same infrastructure & API. If you're using the old ODFB client that was bundled with old versions of Office, you should upgrade. The old ODFB was terrible, and MS has been trying to get rid of it for years. (If you're using an old version of SharePoint 2013/2016 to host OneDrive locally, you should probably patch that too.)
The new client is OK. But it's too late for me. MS have burnt me so many times with OneDrive/SkyDrive/Mesh/Windows Live/FolderSync at this point that I'm now an avowed Dropbox/Resilio user, and I won't be looking back for many years.
A similar consolidation will be happening with the new Skype/Skype for Business clients. They broke my TV's skype camera to make that happen, and it's still not happening. I've switched to Hangouts/FB Messenger. The main reason these transitions are taking so long is: (a) all the on-premises customers create backwards compatibility hell (b) complete confusion around authentication and (c) they doesn't seem to be very good at delivering good software.
The "OneDrive app" is a Windows 10 app store app, similar to the iOS and Android apps.
They did that with Visual Studio too. On Mac it's basically some IDE to develop Ios and Android apps, while on PC you're getting the actual IDE.
And they do that with Skype too, where "Skype for business" is a completely different product that has barely anything to do with Skype.
Does anyone actually use ReFS in production?
If you're interested in ReFS, use Win 10/Server 2016 instead. Microsoft has made a lot of updates and changes to the codebase, including ones to prevent data loss. They're now essentially pitching Storage Spaces+ReFS as a Microsofted ZFS.
> The FCU includes a huge revamp of OneDrive's functionality to make the use of local and remotely stored files virtually seamless.
I'm assuming it makes heavy use of that.
There's no precedent for something like that, and I can't see what motivation there would be to do such a thing either.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google).
(I work on supporting Google Drive, and I also use it outside of work a lot as well).
Also - I saw in another earlier post you mentioned some issue about DriveFS and SecureBoot - feel free to reach out to me if you're still having issues with that?
So I have decided I will never use any google service for something that I really need to rely on. I have a throwaway gmail for giving out to all kinds of spammy websites. I use google photos for backup but also do a full backup on Onedrive. I have a play music subscription but that's not very sticky anyway, I can switch to Apple music at the first sign of trouble.
Also, if you work for google, I'm surprised you think there is no precedent for google discontinuing stuff! It's literally a meme at this point.
You say plenty of Google services have been killed - and you cite 3. But only 1 of those has actually been killed.
Google Reader was shutdown - this is somewhat personal, as I was a bit lover of Google Reader as well. However, there was 12 months of notice for the deprecation, there were provisions for migration/exporting all your data - and there were reasons mentioned at the time for why it was deprecated. Basically, the writing was on the wall for RSS for a long time before that.
Hangouts wasn't discontinued...in fact, I use it as my main chat application currently (both in my personal life, and at work).
GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements - same contacts, same chat history, same platform. Everybody was basically just migrated across wholesale, and got some nice new features to boot (e.g. group video calls).
I don't know, Google reader is still not up. What logic is lost?
> Hangouts wasn't discontinued
It is abandoned, which is worse than dicontinued. No new features, some features have been removed. Apparently it's "enterprise" focused now.
> GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements
Wrong. Read up about this tiny thing called federation. Hangouts is a small, walled-garden subset of gtalk. And even hangouts is deprecated now (at least for consumers). Now if you're a consumer and want to use a google service for chat, you have allo. Allo is a dumbed down subset of hangouts. No multi-device support, no web app, no voice, no sms integration, no video. It has stickers though. Guess some people are fine with that. I'm not.
How's that XMPP federation coming along?
Meanwhile Google has been offering their users 15GB and additional storage bonuses for completing tasks such as your annual security checkup.
They did this - to users who had bought Windows Phones advertised with 15 GB (plus 15 GB which were being given to everybody in 2015, total 30 GB).
Kicked back to 5 GB as of Jan. 2016. Except those who knew to ask by Dec. 2015 to an email circulated in forums (as a concession to protests). Those kept their quota.
Asking about lost quota later to MS support was unfruitful - the techs were ashamed but had their orders to not budge an inch.
(Personally saw both outcomes - keeping and losing, for different users - directly.)
"Why the hell are you collecting information about what file system types I privately run OneDrive on M$!!"
Why, indeed.
I use it to synchronise files across a range of devices - home NAS, phone, and laptop - and love it.
Last, I don't know, four releases of Windows were comically bad. This is when you no longer swear but just laugh in amazement.
I would argue that from their last 6 releases (starting with Windows ME) they only had one success, that is, Windows XP, and even that one they had to rethink with SP2.
(Just bought my wife a Windows 10 laptop... Sigh...)
Especially since windows is a lot more of an acceptable choice when you have a free administrator on call to set it up, paper over any annoyances with whatever workarounds are available, and keep it running.
These users are the majority, and so it's a stretch to call an OS that has captured that market so entirely and completely comically bad. I would argue that it makes it the best.
Ubuntu is pretty usable these days and Windows just isn't.
Are you going to pretend Windows 8 made any sense?
Windows 10 now has everything twice: It has half of apps with full-res and half with old and ugly stretched fonts. It has two control panels! One old and one new. It even has two browsers, both from Microsoft.
It's like everything they ever blamed in Linux, but without even having good excuses. Come on.
By your definition Bach is terrible and boy bands are awesome.
The fact that every laptop comes with Windows 10 proves that nobody cares anymore whether the produce is useful or not.
"You can buy a laptop. Whatever you get, it's with Windows. It's not very good but that's what you're getting. Are you buying or not?"
Come to think of it, Windows laptops are comically bad too by themselves. Wide screens that nobody asked for. Cheap plastic of casings. Unreasonable thickness. General ugliness.
Chromebooks are laptops. They don't come with Windows 10.
MacBooks are laptops. They don't come with Windows 10.
I've not seen a single Chromebook in my life and Macs are exclusively for web programmers.
So Windows 10 is what you get, one might call it BrezhnevOS or PutinOS.
If you bought a Windows one just because you are unaware of alternatives, do more research :)
If you care about GNU/Linux on laptops research properly who is selling them.
Turns out, what gets sold is barely usable, due to OS mainly.
I start to dig why chromebooks ever a thing. Because having nothing other than browser is better than having Windows.