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Comment by _Algernon_ | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people invite an adversarial entity onto their computer just for the convenience of syncing files.

Unison+ssh+Tailscale (or alternatively Syncthing for a slightly more hands-off approach) accomplishes the same with much less overhead and fewer annoyances.

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>I don't understand why people invite an adversarial entity onto their computer just for the convenience of syncing files.

Most dont invite it. MS sneaks it in the backdoor

I recently bought a new PC and only found out it was syncing my desktop and user files to OneDrive (which I never signed up for) unbeknownst to me when it started having problems.

Then I had to find and wade through a few pathetic prompts to disable it. "are you suuure you want to disable cloud backup?" "Are you suure you want to delete your tax filings and financial docs we copied without asking?"

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."

Comment is about Dropbox back then. And yet criticism is very relevant today. Yes, you you could your own FTP looks definitely better that OndeDrive in this case.

Syncthing is so good. I wish more people would use it. Onboarding is certainly more complex than just using Onedrive or installing Dropbox, but once it's set up it just stays out of the way and works.

Unless you go out of your way, it's not invited in, it was already inside. Most people who don't live in o365 don't know or care what OneDrive even is due to how much it sucks.

This is more user hostile tactics to force acceptance of the eventual subscription fees for everything Windows.

My company switched off of perfectly working SMB shares to OneDrive + SharePoint about a year ago and it has been the singlehanded biggest generator of helpdesk tickets since. I'm trying to get corporate to let me use rclone since I can at least tell it to push/pull a specific file instead of waiting for OneDrive to finish "syncing changes".

I only use OneDrive for the auto save and versioning feature in Excel. Before giving in, I'd frequently come back to a computer that had restarted itself in the night (?) and I'd have to figure out if I needed to preserve the auto save files of things I only had open for reference.

LibreOffice Calc is becoming a better option though. I like the new array functions in Excel but I don't think anyone else I'd share a spreadsheet to understands them. Meanwhile, Excel makes it hard to work with Unicode CSV, no longer has the option to bring up the text import wizard when opening a CSV, silently changes your date formats, etc. For my uses it's become frustrating. Libre has kept working like I expect.

Windows 11 more or less forces OneDrive onto the machine. It takes active work to get rid of it.

By "people" do you mean all people or just a few here on this forum? I would never use OneDrive, and I can tell you why people would use it: it's easy, and for the most part it just works. Most people don't care or consider it "adversarial". There are over a billion Windows computers.

Learned helplessness, especially when it comes to tech, is a societal problem in the making.

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