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Comment by jwnin | Hacker News Reader

I use OneDrive at work for all of my documents and have never encountered the horror stories I frequently read. I read these stories often enough where I believe there genuinely is a problem. But I do wonder why there is a difference for some and not others. Perhaps I've conditioned myself to live with its faults?

I will say that the Microsoft Office OneDrive save experience is completely subpar. It behaves completely separate & unlike Windows Explorer and is just unpleasant to work with.

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We weren't using OneDrive at work, then we had it imposed, and everyone went through a few days period where they had to find where their documents went and/or changing the hardcoded paths in various things to match the new location.

Using OneDrive is often fine. Having it imposed on you is a breaking change.

I didn't have a problem until I migrated to another Mac. Then I started having duplicate files. I think I fixed it by logging out of everything and deleting the duplicates but it was a couple hours wasted. Didn't have this problem with Dropbox in my career.

Definitely and still a happy paying Dropbox user, even though I'm well within my free limits (after several referral storage bumps). IT pretty much just works, but the Linux experience could use some updates.

My experience is exactly the same. I use OneDrive for easy replication of lots of stuff between my own devices, and to transfer files to friends. I've never had a lost-data problem.

On the other hand, UX for doing that sharing is clunky.

And I believe it's pretty well documented that the reason for the File-Save experience being so awful is that Microsoft is actively trying to deter us from using our own local storage, and coercing us to use their (subscription) cloud products.

The problem with this thinking is that you can never be sure these problems won’t happen to you.

I’m pretty sure it had worked just fine for the users in the article too, until it didn’t.

IMO they should clearly encourage users to keep backups elsewhere in case something happens, but they’re currently doing the exact opposite: encouraging users to back up (and on Windows even store) files exclusively on OneDrive.

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