Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

I'm shocked that I can't find a single top-level comment that understands that the general public does not back up their data. We can call OneDrive a dark pattern or saving customer's butts from themselves. If it wasn't the default: "What do you mean all my pictures are gone forever because I never turned on OneDrive?".

I have no love for Microsoft but I'm having a really hard time seeing how it isn't the smart default to backup the user's files/photos to the cloud. Sure, if you are here on HN then maybe you have NextCloud, Immich, Dropbox, Google Drive/Photos, etc, that you make sure to backup your pictures to. I can assure you the general public does no such thing unless it's the default in the OS.

Try consoling a few people about how the pictures or files they hold dear are gone forever and then come back and talk about this "dark pattern".

This blog post is somehow a success story? No, it's a ticking time bomb. Great, you free'd up space for email at the expense of un-protecting all his pictures/files. That's not a win.

The author gets _so close_ to the point but manages to miss it completely:

> but I suspect that he deleted files (including family photos) for which he had no other backup.

> I’m a computer nerd, and if you are reading this you probably are as well. We can change that setting ourselves without much thought, and we probably have backups of our important data in case recovery is necessary.

But they couldn't make 1 more tiny hop to "my neighbor will not manage backups and so these files are now at risk".

I do say in my post that I performed a backup. I should have clarified that that was not merely for my benefit while performing the work. My final conversation with him involved handing off a clearly labeled USB drive, and an explanation that all the data from his laptop was copied to that drive and that he should store it somewhere safe.

> Try consoling a few people about how the pictures or files they hold dear are gone forever and then come back and talk about this "dark pattern".

I have, and pretty much every time I've had that conversation with someone it ended with them buying a portable storage drive and having learned a valuable lesson regarding the need for a real backup strategy.

Microsoft's design choices can be both a benefit and an abuse of its users. There's no excuse here for using important features and functionality of the software as an underhanded marketing exercise.

You described your client as:

> not tech literate.

Yet you expect him to understand the need to backup his data, manually, to a local device?

You want to use a 3-2-1 backup strategy:

- 3 backups

- 2 different mediums

- 1 (at least) offsite

A local USB drive satisfies only part of that and doesn't account for the most important (IMHO) offsite requirement. And again, unless there is a some automated process you can assume whatever backup you took will probably be the only one ever done. Perhaps they will backup manually a handful of times but it's just not realistic to expect anyone, even a "computer nerd", to manually backup their files regularly.

I'm really not trying to be a jerk here but I fear you have a call in your future about how their computer died and they plugged that "thumb thing you gave us" into the new computer ("actually, do you have a dongle? The new computer only has round holes, not these square ones") but I have the pictures I took last week (/month/year/since you took the original backup).

Synchronisation is not back-up. Dropbox is not a back-up mechanism.

If files get deleted on the local host, they get deleted from OneDrive/Dropbox too.

> If files get deleted on the local host, they get deleted from OneDrive/Dropbox too.

Dropbox, at least, does offer file history but I'm talking about protecting against hardware failure here more than a user deleting their own files. That's the use-case I've personally dealt with more often than not. "I dropped my phone in the pool, how do I get my pictures back", "My laptop won't turn on anymore, just shows a folder with a question mark on it when I try to boot", etc. Self-inflicted or just general hardware failure is the main issue people deal with in my experience.

Synchronisation isn't a complete backup, but it's another copy of one's data if one's device gets lost, stolen, or broken.

You have a point, but it doesn’t matter: at the end of the day, 5GB is not nearly enough for most folk’s important backups (photos), and the fact it consumes your email storage and you can’t receive emails is the dark pattern.

Maybe this default makes sense… if MS was generously giving everyone a couple hundred GB. Otherwise it’s a cash-grab.

Everyone else does it too, which also sucks. They just don’t fill it all up as quickly. Though iMessage in iCloud is a good comparison bc pictures people send you fill up iCloud FAST. Thing is, you can still receive iMessages and use everything just fine — you just can’t backup your phone any more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com