Comment by Octabrain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Octabrain | Hacker News Reader

Not relate with the post but a rant against OneDrive a couple of weeks ago came to my mind:

My partner uses Windows 11. She works and also studies in college. In both places they use Office360 so, she has her laptop set up with her Microsoft accounts and switches between college one and work when needs it. The other day, she came for help asking why the college OneDrive was getting full when she only has documents. Turns out that the fucking OneDrive decided to synchronize the whole user personal folder (where she has very personal stuff) into the college's OneDrive. Surprisingly, disabling such a wrong behavior was not straight forward as I expected. Microsoft has managed to make it ambiguous enough for having to spend a fair amount of time on such a simple thing.

I don't know it's just another example of them trying to shovel down your throat their cloud services or just some obscure plan to simply have access to all your very personal data (or both).

This sounds like College IT is using Known folder redirection to have files backed up seamlessly to Onedrive.

Source: Msft Employee

So, you are telling me that my girlfriend's college IT department, has the capability, through Office 360, of manipulating which folders to backup on the clients side? Man, I really hope it's Friday and my brain is exhausted and not getting what you said straight, otherwise, this weekend is gonna be a session of urgent OneDrive removal and Linux indoctrination for her.

Seems like that's true: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/redirect-known-...

When you log into a business Microsoft account on Windows or in Office, it asks you if you want to give your business control over the device. She might have answered “yes” to make the prompt go away (and “yes” is a sensible answer on a corporate laptop, but definitely not when using a personal laptop for work/university)

I would assume that the college IT dept is using tools made for businesses, which businesses will usually set up on machines they own (that is, not employee personal hardware), so in that case it's not unreasonable for the business to be able to set up which folders get backed up. Of course, it's never a great idea to store personal things on your work computer, for this reason and others.

But of course that model isn't a great fit for university students, who will usually not have a laptop issued by the university. Not an excuse for this happening, but I can understand how it would.

I remain baffled at how presumptuous Microsoft is about OneDrive and its behavior.

One of the big issues we see with Office365 in the browser are people working with two different Office365 accounts in the same browser, which causes a lot of issues. Known folder redirection, which is the ability for us to turn on automatic syncing of the Desktop, Documents and Pictures folders on Windows machines has been pretty helpful for us. So many people dump everything on their desktop and if the computer dies or files have been accidentally deleted it saves them. Known folder redirect is now rolling out to Mac clients, which is more of a pain, as some of our users sign into iCloud and sync those same folders.

I know way too many people whom this has happened to. High school accounts, college accounts, even work accounts.

Even when it's a personal account, that feature messes up the C:\Users\username folder layout so then some apps save things into the non-OneDrive desktop folder and there's no way for an ordinary user to find them. Not to mention syncing broken program shortcuts (.lnk files) across devices and so on. This whole synchronization feature is a sysadmin nightmare slapped on top of a filesystem that wasn't designed to support it.

Its a hack and ugly. But lots of system admin folks love it and between them pushing it at work and MS pushing it its hard to avoid. Its reaaaaal shitty though, especially when they enable it on someone with a huge profile and you're in a baffling in-between while its trying to sync.

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