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Comment by ano-ther | Hacker News Reader

That would improve things.

Over the weekend, a family member could not log into their laptop any longer. Turned out to be “a problem with Teams” that required an unscheduled update which was marked as optional. Needless to say that they never used Teams on that machine.

When the login worked partially, their files weren’t accessible because they accidentally saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only. And OneDrive was also affected by the Teams bug.

Spent a good part of the day cursing in the direction of Redmond.

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This happened on my work machine. One day I noticed tons of important files had been deleted without my permission after being migrated to OneDrive online only. At no point did I authorize anything like this and it took some time to copy them all back and disable everything I could access related to this.

Utter insanity that this can happen in a major OS. I switched to Linux for personal use years ago and have only gotten more grateful for that decision over time. My head would explode if a Linux distro tried any number of things that Windows regularly does to abuse their users, it's unfathomable.

> saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only

This is why local backups should always have the highest priority.

Storing online can be useful, but people should never forget that local backups are the best.

Fully agree.

The problem is that on a fresh system with a free MS account, OneDrive shows up as the first choice as “$User - Personal files”. No notice that this actually only stores it online and offers only a fraction of the 1TB local drive.

Truly deceptive and my mistake for not noticing when I helped to set up that laptop.

Don't feel bad. Even if you noticed, It is likely that during the next "security" update, one drive would be re-enabled, as the default - and possibly everything moved there.

lol wtf

> OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only

Holy shit that's nuts!

Makes it easier for them to mine your files for personal data they can use to push ads I guess.

All they (all big tech companies) have been doing for the past decades has been mining data for ads. Yet, they still are pretty much stuck on the same level:

- I search for and buy something, they keep showing me ads for the thing I don't need anymore.

- I check out some random product, they all think if they just show me one more ad with that product, I will surely buy it.

While I am not immune to ads and they help with brand recognition, it can sometimes serve opposite purpose than intended.

- You started watching videos about farm equipment and how repairable it isn't. Now you get ads for farm supplies. You haven't been on a farm in 25 years.

I view it as a change in philosophy that does allow more ads indeed and goes deeper into how microsoft view themselves and by extension their customers:

You have an account that exists on Microsoft - on being somewhere, multiple places at once, even in location and function, in a ocean of Microsoft but whose existence and ownership of existence is finely permissioned.

vs.

You own your device(s).

Worse, when Microsoft made this change, One Drive actually deleted almost a terabyte of files from my Mac.

Uninstalled, restored from a recent backup, and haven't used it, or any other cloud sync application, since.

One drive. On a server in one of Microsoft's datacenters.

Since forever, I've been pretty stubborn with managing my tech/digital stuff myself, even if it's kind of a pain, and this kind of shit reinforces that belief. Other entities, especially big companies, cannot be trusted with your tech. The best place for my hardware is in my house; software, in my own git repo; data, in plain files on my hard drives. The fewer hands that touch it, the better. Just let me have it my own way, please.

That must be the free version of OneDrive that forces cloud only.

It doesn't force cloud only. It defaults to cloud only. This is for both free and paid versions.

It has been this way for 3 years.

Default = Effectively Force for most users, I would think.

So now 'cloud' is a reason to need local backups. Full circle!

On Linux, I have my backup script that syncs the data to two local disks + Cloudflare R2. I run it when I want to even though I can schedule it to run automatically. I also use Syncthing which syncs the important files between my main computer and phone. So I have 4 copies of the data and I'm paying only for R2 (which I deliberately opted for). The setup works exactly as per my wishes and my needs. I am so grateful that Linux has given me that freedom.

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