OneDrive data now has an expiry date | Hacker News Reader

OneDrive data now has an expiry date

ms365news.com

172 pointstaubek156 comments

One drive is an insanely poorly implemented solution to a problem nobody really had.

For enterprise companies, ones I've worked in at least, they will auto sync the users folder /c/Users/(name) with one drive, but there is some weird alternative they have to set on the windows system to actually use a workspace for the user.

So when I'm on site somewhere, and have no access to a network that's safe, I can't access files that are in my documents folder, pictures or desktop.. when I never asked OneDrive to lift and shift my days off my machine.

I've had the guys turn off one drive explicitly on my machine several times but it keeps reactivating itself as soon as I sign back into the AD.

They can't figure it out, I can't trust it, and the company pays for it.

I’ve seen a lot of people have issues with git, because this is going on in the background and they don’t realize it.

They’ll change branches, then OneDrive sees files are missing, so it starts pulling them back down. It makes a mess.

Any new hire we get, we need to make sure to explicitly tell them not to keep their code in a folder managed by OneDrive, but they never listen. They speak up about a month later, complaining about weird issues.

On my last laptop refresh I also had to manually enable the sync. It didn’t just happen. I knew if I used the local folders that would eventually stop working and things would get lost.

I’ve also seen a lot of confusion from people who save something to their desktop, and it’s not there… because they didn’t save it to their OneDrive desktop. This is always fun to explain.

OneDrive is also now our backup, but they only sync 3 folders from the home directory. If your work has you using other folders, good luck and enjoy your data loss. I setup a scheduled job to backup some of my other key files to OneDrive, but that was quite annoying. I’m sure I’m in the minority.

The enterprise enables all this stuff, but never actually tells anyone. They think it will “just work”, but it creates a confusing mess that every employee eventually has to figure out.

It is irritating how Microsoft markets onedrive as a backup solution, because then people think 'oh, we have onedrive, why do we need another backup solution?', when onedrive is so unsuited to being the working copy of so many different kinds of data.

The problem is, even though one knows that OneDrive is not a viable backup solution, Microsoft crippled its own "Windows Backup" feature and buried under the rock.

Now I have to pay another company to be able to have a proper backup solution. Why trash your own competent solution for monies and data extraction? It's not a wise move.

There are actually really good free backup solutions, like https://kopia.io/ Tried a couple of paid ones first because I didn't know about them, but this is even better

Thanks, looks interesting. For my personal Linux systems, I use backintime and pay for Acronis for my parents' Windows system right now (since it can also image disks and whatnot), but I'll keep this in mind, too.

Thanks again.

> It is irritating how Microsoft markets onedrive as a backup solution

Microsoft has a long history of messing with user files (Sharepoint checkout to "My Documents" wherever "My Documents" points today. Avoid at all cost.

Also, it's not even a backup. If your files are only on OneDrive (which is the default "storage save" setting), good luck recovering them if they break into your account.

I keep my code in OneDrive. I probably have hundreds of repos cloned and active. Been going like this since like 2018 or so.

I’ve never had problems except for warnings about deleting lots of filed when I git branch or checkout or whatever.

I would expect onedrive not to pull down files after a checkout because from a file io, it’s deleting and copying in new files, right?

You're pretty lucky, then. This kind of file sync is a cursed problem in general (in that a truly robust solution is just not possible), but onedrive seems to be particularly bad in terms of reverting local changes, not syncing changes, and generally messing things up, especially when there's a lot of files, and even when there's only one user of the data. (it also makes anything involving writing lots of temporary files even slower, like most software builds).

It needs to read the repo under .git; that’s a lot of files that may not be synced, depending on local disk space, frequency of use, etc. The local disk is just a cache.

There may be an option to Always keep on this device, which might help.

Sometimes there will be a delay while git rebuilds the index and pulls everything down. But its never affected my commits or anything substantial.

This is why we had to add some group policy changes to ban One Drive throughout our agency. Additionally, some of our work is "confidential" and non-public which also got the legislature to ban the use of One Drive for most stuff (they specifically stated "cloud").

> I’ve seen a lot of people have issues with git, because this is going on in the background and they don’t realize it.

Having git tied to a one drive folder is diabolical. We might aswell move back to SVN at that stage.

And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost.

YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.

OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.

>So when I'm on site somewhere, and have no access to a network that's safe, I can't access files that are in my documents folder, pictures or desktop.. when I never asked OneDrive to lift and shift my days off my machine.

Probably enterprise config. Standard OneDrive office 365 enterprise with SharePoint can absolutely work over the "normal internet", you don't need a "network that's safe" whatever that means. VPN? Anyway the big office 365 win was it will work over the normal internet without running /owa open on your exchange server.

>And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost. [...] OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.

In my previous job there was an app(by Dell EMC I think) that would run every day at lunch and backup all your user document folders to some company network drive. You could then view all your backup files in the webUI.

So network backup feels like a solved problem for decades now.

However, cloud is more than just a backup solution.

Some jank 3rd party app is never preferred over a native MS solution.

Lol. OneDrive is the most jank solution there is.

The failure modes of OneDrive outweigh the wins for many individual users.

It may be good enough in the aggregate from the perspective of IT admins.

No catastrophic failures, just a steady drip of confusion, friction, frustration and lost productivity for the users.

Id rather the people being irresponsible with their files lose them than me randomly.

My IT even set up my downloads folder to sync... my job involves downloading 4gb files and throwing them away after I run a script on them frequently...

That sounds more like an issue with your relationship with your IT guy than OneDrive as a product.

Not necessarily blaming you for the relationship fault, but someone forcing using the software improperly isn't really a failure of the software.

The second part is, yeah. I'm more annoyed with the whole concept and was using that as evidence of its reliability, and also about how we're willing to sacrifice time without thinking about tradesoffs when it comes to "more onedrive backup better"

That's why Dropbox exists. Superior in every way.

You could use an actual backup solution, OneDrive is not that.

Cloud document best use case is document sharing for online collaboration, backup is a side effect, and frankly, as backup solution it is far from ideal.

Frankly, the best configuration is NOT installing OneDrive on user machines, actually disallow users to install it and let them share files from office 365 itself when they actually want to share those files. And then, have a proper network backup solution.

Make

Also just having your stuff available on multiple devices, having it be easy to move devices, etc.

All that said, I don't like the deep desktop-OneDrive type integration, very much a clear, separate sync folders type person, even if I store a bunch of my stuff inside said folder. But Sync Service Kingdoms are to be very clear, it's the one way they will be ~99% benefit, 1% headache.

The best thing you can do with an enterprise Onedrive is having long long file and folder names. The moment it exceeds 255 characters, the software application dies. I am ready to hear easier fixes but so far this worked:

- Rename the offending folder from the web

- Unlink the folder from the user's machine

- Delete the existing onedrive folder

- Relink and resync

The best part is, the web side of onedrive has practically unlimited length, the windows part has. As long as you don't sync, you don't experience anything but god forbid if you try to do it.

Also do not get me started on "Add a shortcut/Sync" debate. All in all, onedrive feels like a system that works but will feed you to the wolves the moment it hiccups. But on the enterprise side that's the only game in town so... we suffer altogether.

An elderly family member rearranged her family tree into folders that were so deep it broke onedrive entirely.

Of course it was not set to keep all files on the PC so it just trashed them.

Be careful.

I turned onedrive off and removed it. Then just cross fingers she drops dead before the disk does. If I go over there I robocopy it onto a USB stick.

My workplace has named (forcefully) the onedrive folder with around 35 characters. You add to that the path to that folder on the computer that is (forcefully) not on the root of a disk. I now mostly need a flat structure for my files. 4-5 subfolders and a file and onedrive dies.

You can change that setting in Windows so that it no longer has a 255 character limit.

Yes, you can but then if you have any older software in your system (for company reasons) will not play ball. And it is a workaround, not a permanent solution. Because we still do not have that fabled WinFS so...

Eh, NTFS supported long paths since forever, the problem is with applications using Win32 APIs that are limited to MAX_PATH (260 characters) path length.

There won't be a permanent solution unless all Windows applications start using NT path formatting - which won't happen.

One drive still dies though

Win64 lacks the problem with 255 characters [0]. However, stuff like File Explorer, which the vast majority of my users actually use, can only pass the first 255 characters to the registered application [1], so will Explorer will display stuff with huge long paths, double-clicking that file, or right clicking and "Compress to..." will cause an error.

0 - 32 bit windows will always have this problem.

1 - This is because File Explorer uses a hodgepodge of Win32 and Win64 stuff behind the scenes when running 64 bit windows.

so many times,… I’ve lost count

The whole thing is a cobbled together bodge over SharePoint as a backend. I wouldn't ever trust my company data with that dogwater product.

Back when I had to work with it I found a bug that could cause folders to become un-synced without you realising, meaning changes would not be tracked and cause merge-conflicts when it was fixed.

Managed to use our Gold partner tickets to raise the issue with the product team, they flat out refused to fix the issue even knowing it was a bug. This was back in 2020 or so, I wonder if they ever fixed that bug. It's pretty simple to reproduce:

1. - Sync a nested subfolder from Sharepoint

2. - Sync the parent folder

3. - Note that the folder synced in 1. is not longer being tracked (no checkmark)

4. - Normal users will now go to folder 1. by default and have no idea none of their changes are no longer being tracked now that it's being synced within folder 2.

The university I attend uses SharePoint, classroom and moodle for various courses.

SharePoint is by far the worst piece of software I've ever used. Like, there's no mental model to be done, not intuitive, not working, files disappear from time to time, and I could go on for hours

Moodle is also pretty garbage-y if I may say so.

I'd say its ui is not that great and it is not intuitive when searching courses, but at least it... Works? I mean, using SharePoint might require me to reload the page more than once because I literally don't see the files sometimes

Isn't sharepoint itself a cobbled together on top of Microsoft Exchange mailboxes?

Plus some WebDAV hacks via the MS Frontpage HTML editor! Truly great software engineering and design.

So it's MS products all the way down.

Somehow finding the Frontpage HTML editors down at the bottom makes it feel slightly better. At least it bring a fond memory while navigating our corporate Sharepoint horrorfest.

Don't forget the worst SQL Server database I have ever seen. Single threaded hacks all throughout because it so shitty it can't deal with parallel queries.

Plus the sync results in so many errors and duplicates even on a personal drive with one machine that it is not fit for purpose.

Downloads folder to the rescue, hallelujah!

I have almost exclusively used the downloads folder since a late teen, because I realized it was the only place where I could trust microslop to not mess with my stuff.

Now I mostly use my self hosted cloud, but I do still have all of my short term things in downloads that don't need a form of backup

> solution to a problem nobody really had.

It's honestly been great for my org. We used to have custom user-specific shared drives on the network. Laptop replacements were constantly hindered by people not understanding how to transfer data. Since we rolled out OD (not my decision by a mile), that's been consistently easy.

OneDrive likes to come back when O365 updates I think, but you might be able to change the settings to just not back those dirs up?

No access to a network that's safe? Do you have a zero day on SSL we should know about?

You can easily set OneDrive to keep a local copy of all files.

Come on, a problem nobody really had? I wholeheartedly disagree. Data loss and the orthogonal problem of lacking free space on computers is/was a massive problem at enterprise scale and OneDrive, for all its many shortcomings, is well and truly into good-enough territory to cover the 80% case. I'd go so far as to argue that the scenario you've described is by far the less frequent one. And if it frustrates you, you're afforded the ability to designate files and entire folders to be kept downloaded at all times anyway.

Data loss and storage is always a challenge, that's why companies will have network drives, network storage that's not strongly coupled with your account acess. OneDrive doesn't solve the problem in a clean way. It adds an extra layer of brittleness.

Network storage does not handle the online/offline switching as transparently as OneDrive (or other cloud storage).

For large enterprises that old architecture you refer to means long lead times on network and storage outage notifications, and huge fallout if an outage window is blown.

And if the building network goes down, or if your storage servers are located off site because you’re too big for one building and the commercial internet goes down, etc etc

But it doesn’t have to be OneDrive. There are many other options. I run ownCloud 10 for my personal files. If I were a small to medium business, I would look hard at OCIS.

onedrive doesn't really handle online/offline switching well. Unless you configure it carefully, it will generally not keep stuff local and so things will break without an internet connection.

Network drives mean no local retention and no real good answer for Windows+Mac+Android+iOS clients to remotely access the files. It also doesn't solve sharing those files externally with granular permissions.

All of these kinds things need protection against data loss and centralized control+management, not just the user folder alone.

> Network drives mean no local retention

Technically speaking, Windows does support client-side caching on network drives. I've used it in the past for a highly limited number of users (read: me, on a personal share) and it works kind of like OneDrive/Dropbox/other cloud platform. But it's really rough and doesn't handle conflicts well.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/web-hosting/configurin...

10 years ago this was not a key requirement. But now it is

Sadly One Drive has pushed out the implementation of proper DMS in some instances.

isn't that also the case witf onedrive because it deletes local copies?

With OneDrive if you edit a file offline and someone edits a file online AND it's not a file type edit it can attempt to merge (like with Office documents) you end up with "{name}-conflict.{extension}" files rather than deleted local copies. You also get version history of files and the recycle bin of files deleted from the cloud to recover any mistakes from.

And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost.

YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.

OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.

Sure. And you wouldn't need phishing protections if users had brains. But then you run into real users so hand-holding solutions start to make sense.

Seems to me that if you want to experience data loss, Sharepoint is going to cover your needs just fine.

>One drive is an insanely poorly implemented solution to a problem nobody really had.

I highly doubt that the need to steal as much data and media from people to train AI was a problem nobody really had.

You are conflating private OneDrive with enterprise Office 365 Sharepoint based solution.

Also that came out 10-13 years ago... way before AI. Why are people on this site such midwits?

I guess because the general hatred of Microsoft interferes with people's ability to think logically.

> hatred of Microsoft interferes with people's ability to think logically

100%. I fall in the 'I hate MS (and Apple, and Google, and...)' crowd myself. I lose brain cells every time I have to use MS products, so I definitely make nonlogical statements about these companies sometimes. I admit that my biasies are strong and one can't fully trust my opinion when I talk about these companies. But I do try to lace mostly truth, even if I exaggerate.

> Also that came out 10-13 years ago... way before AI.

Do you think AI training and preceding data vacuuming started yesterday? Was there no "Big Data" hype immediately before LLMs took off?

> Why are people on this site such midwits?

Address this question to a mirror.

I get the irony lmao

But Big Data was just a large SQL set for companies internally. Usually. The sinister part would be adverts and tracking I guess if that is what you are fishing for.

I'd guess it is more about making companies paying more and higher subs than training data.

Standard sub gives 1TB per user.

Laptop drives are still 256 or 512GB in office work.

No real need to pay for "higher subs"

It's about pushing subs in the first place. Normal people don't need it they can save stuff to their HD/SSD like they've been doing for the last 30 years.

But here comes Microsoft enabling OneDrive by default. How many tech illiterate folks have been pushed into paying for 365? Fuck MS.

I am talking about companies to be precise.

Office 365 was and is a godsend compare to running Exchange and massive SANs on-prem...

They knew this so Office 365 at first was literally only email at first so people could stop having OWA on prem open to the web.

F OneDrive. They locked me out without any explanation and without any notificaiton, ended my subscription and I lost valuable photos forever. Stay away from it if you are looking for storage for any reason.

Indeed, they are probably one of the worst cloud "storage" services ever to exist.

I also lost data on their platform. Not sure why anyone would like to still use them. This follows a pattern of Microsoft mishandling their user's data. They even routinely delete code hosted on their servers when they shutdown services without handling the migration well.

I'm building a digital document archive organizer platform that relies on users' own local machine storage and their cloud storage, and the only provider I trust to support are s3-compatible storage and Google drive (much as I'm wary of Google, Gdrive is reliable). Dropbox, Box, etc are also ok, but the storage is kind of expensive.

I would never support OneDrive.

Data request. Or just sue them.

You make it sound way simpler than it is. Their ToS are probably written in a way they are fully protected in cases like this.

ToS are not laws and can not override laws. If you are in any civilized jurisdiction, such as EU, you can sue.

This is data theft and there should be criminal charges against Microsoft for this nonsense.

The whole OneDrive ecosystem is scary as hell.

I don't want to imagine how much mess they have in their backend, given that most Microsoft 365 products rely on SharePoint in one way or another. And then, sometimes you get a "peek" of what's happening behind the scenes (spurious folders, random files appearing, hidden libraries, etc...).

Whenever I was forced to interact with OneDrive, I couldn't help imagining the proverbial digital duct tape holding everything together behind the scenes.

> Let me paint a familiar picture. Someone leaves your organisation, or a licence gets removed as part of a cost-saving exercise.

That's a rather weird way of phrasing it. It almost suggested that you shouldn't audit your license needs.

Other than this was always the case, it's hard to see why data stored in a close account wouldn't get deleted.

Also the deletion will kick in after 12 months

> Day 1: licence removed or user deleted: The clock starts. The OneDrive account is now unlicensed and the retention countdown begins.

> Day 60: read-only mode: No more edits.

So yeah if you spend 12 months without realizing you might need the data of someone who left then I think that's on you

Data is on pragmatic lockout after 3 months, not 12.

For years, enterprises have been conditioned to lean into OneDrive and forget about it. Indeed, that dark pattern is a festering disease across consumer Windows.

This is classic Microsoft long rug pull.

> Someone leaves your organisation

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/retention-and-d...

"By default, when a user is deleted, the user's manager is automatically given access to the user's OneDrive"

Seems like it should be enough time to firesale the data out you need as a manager.

It's LLM phraseology.

It comes up with a scenario where it could be a problem ( license removal ), and then it generates why a license might get removed ( "cost-saving" ).

It's not a person thinking, so there's no real thought to whether it is really a likely scenario, it's just something that sounds plausible.

I read too many blogs, I've come to spot these phrases that trip a feeling of, "Wait, do people really do that?".

You'll still have someone along in the comments to suggest that this article isn't AI slop, and that people really do remove individual one-drive licenses from active people in an organisation to cut costs, that this is just "edited" by AI, etc.

But it's slop from start to finish. Or in LLM speak, "The slop is real".

Related story: I recently watched a new video by a well-known YouTuber whom I was subscribed to for years. Something was off with the video: the script sounded like LLM slop. It sounded as if the author provided some bullet points on the main content of the script, and then let the LLM "expand" on it, with its typical, overly verbose, mode-collapsed LLM style. Then the YouTuber seems to have added some light edits to the script himself because it did sound real occasionally.

This was just after a few minutes of video and I didn't finish watching it. At a quick glance, I didn't see anybody else pointing this out in the comments. Disappointing.

How can I be so certain about LLM usage after just a few minutes? It's both the fact that it sounded like slop, and the fact that I intuitively know his real writing style from past years, and it simply sounded very different this time.

An article about OneDrive being substantially LLM written is sort of okay (who cares about OneDrive by some Office365 blog), but if people you thought you like resort to these methods I feel betrayed.

I had something similar happen where someone linked a blog article, I thought it sounded like slop, especially since they were posting 2-3 articles a day, but I wasn't sure so I checked their back catalogue.

I then saw they've always written like that, and always posted 2-3 articles a day, so I figured they're prolific and LLMs copied their style.

Then I read their first post again, and realised I should check the wayback machine.

Sure enough, they had gone through their entire post history, and had rewritten it with an LLM, to make it less obvious when they started using them.

Now, this was always a bit of a junk site, a knock-off Boing Boing, but it seems incredible to me that someone would replace their original posts with AI gen.

Surely it destroys any reputation you might have?

A site they've been running for nearly 20 years, overwritten by slop.

Compare:

Original: https://web.archive.org/web/20191017113113/https://www.geeky...

Rewritten slop: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/metal-detecting-sandals/

So he is rewriting the past without any visible indicator that he did so, and with the original publication date. That's deceptive and borders on unethical.

I get the feeling lots of blogs that are making advertising money are incentivized to do this: the most SEO buzzwords, the most "clinical" language, the most adjectives... I get that "this isn't right" feeling often now and I usually just close the browser and do something else.

Damn this is horrible. So the author chose to waste everyone's time by expanding with cow manure. I generally don't read much articles online anymore since they are all likely to contain slop unless authored by known non-slop users.

Yea, that’s sad.

> or a licence gets removed as part of

Or, as is more common in large enterprise licensing schemes - the vendor changes the terms and the customer never notices. And the .gov side of Microsoft licensing changes as often and as inscrutably as the commercial side of Microsoft licensing.

We've had more than a few discussions where conference calls with Microsoft end with the "oh, that used to be part of your license, but now it isn't" with the only solution being to bend over and open up the agency's wallet.

SharePoint/ OneDrive suck, but this policy change seems sane. What's crazy if anything is that they didn't have this policy before.

lol, my org recently silently implemented automatic archiving for SharePoint files with mtimes older than 5 years. Woke up to 20,000 files in cold storage and the only user facing remedy is to manually restore each file one at a time.

After speaking with IT for several days, they begrudgingly exempted my site after ‘leadership approval’ but were confounded as to “why anyone would need files older than 5 years”

Forget the AI boom, there still orgs struggling with storage, databases, and email.

Don’t put your data in onedrive at all. We’ve experienced multiple cases of data loss which were definitely either implementation bugs or files simply being unreadable or lost.

At least onedrive do not corrupt my powerpoints, while pcloud systematically break them, police change, elements resized randomely. It happens systematically with powerpoints weighting more than 100Mb.

I wouldn’t use any cloud stuff for any Microsoft document formats. Copy it in after you’ve done the work at most.

This will have a huge impact on a lot of organisations, for example those that have a communal SharePoint, or shared document page: files shared from ex-employees for critical documentation is going to break.

AFAIK Sharepoint doesn't have these limitations. The idea is that in companies OneDrive should not be used for permanent stuff. Which is strange, to be granted, but after all using OneDrive for company documents basically means they are being shared out of some personal space that doesn't belong anywhere.

And if they haven't migrated the ownership of the OneDrive to another user's account in 12 months (such as cascading the drive up to the next manager to pull out whatever docs)... what kind of other bad IT and managerial practices are in use?

The worst managerial practice is to use OneDrive for company work purposes. For anybody else than the original creator these docs are nowhere to be found unless you know the shared URL.

>shared out of some personal space that doesn't belong anywhere

Do you care explaining this better?

(moreover, to this day I still can't understand the difference between SharePoint and OneDrive -- if there's any)

Do you see "personal" and something that looks like your name in the path? That's your personal onedrive, like your home directory on a unix system.

See "sites" in the URL? That's a sharepoint site (AKA teams "shared" folder).

The former disappears (after a year) when the user license is removed. The latter is not associated with an individual user, so even if everyone in a team leaves the company it isn't just automatically removed.

Following was wrong and had been edited: The non-business personal onedrive was a box.com/dropbox/g-drive competitor. Microsoft moved its backend to Sharepoint at some time. (Onedrive for business used Sharepoint from the get-go). The integration of the personal drive, even though it's a descendent from the 'for business' product, is still quite unintuitive in my opinion.

Odfb has always had a SharePoint backend. Used to be called MySites and carried no relation to the consumer product you’re confusing it with.

Exactly this!

Arguably, this situation is already broken right now. If an organization can't be bothered to use their tools (Sharepoint and the wider O365 ecosystem) correctly, it's entirely on them.

Organization employees use tools in a way that is practical for them. In microsoft case, it often means "incorrectly" and that is on Microsoft too.

Retention and legal holds: Data can still be deleted even if a retention policy or legal hold is in place, unless licensing or billing is restored first. Do not rely on holds alone to protect unlicensed data.

Surprising it doesn't automatically move into an admin or company lawyer's drive so it can be dealt with rather then a few notifications which will probably be missed and the data permanently deleted.

Don’t worry, you have ~30 days, that should be enough for you to audit your entire org. /s

That number has no connection to the actual system.

I can’t see any suggestion that accounts already 12 months since they were deactivated won’t be nuked in July. You’re potentially getting a months notice in the short term.

Looking into the actual announcements, they're not 100% clear but I'd be shocked if they skipped the archival period for old accounts. But also they originally announced this a long time ago and the official page says they've been rolling it out since January last year.

I wouldn’t want to gamble on that assumption.

True, but if I was worried about having too many accounts to track down in the next week I would go ask them and also I would have probably started doing something in the last year plus.

If you start uploading data to your cloud without my clear consent, I already see a very big problem with your product.

If you even substitute the directories in my computer (a standard that was untouched for the last 20 years) in a way to force my stuff into your cloud, then there’s a much bigger problem.

Managers who approved this should be thrown out of the company because this is clearly how NOT to make a product.

Microsoft had the idea that PCs are like phones.

Google/Apple sync everything in the background so Microsoft wanted to do it as well.

What does this have to do with the article you're responding to which is about OneDrive for Business?

More HN comments, less reddit comments, please.

He's right. I've had this garbage turns itself on then steal files into the cloud. When you disconnect it your files are suddenly gone and you have no idea why. There's a reason I daily drive Linux.

The behavior described is what OneDrive does

Apologies for my unknowning, but how did this blog get this information? There's no source or anything linked.

It is in Messace Center post MC1381210, published June 5.

Hasn't this already been the case?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/unlicensed-oned...

Besides the OneDrive hate here, this doesn't seem that newsworthy? It reads like the storage of users that have their license revoked will be deleted. Which is how I'd expect the service to work. If anything, it's weird that their files were kept.

You can find multiple comments on past OneDrive posts from people who are/were at Microsoft with frankly terrifying stories of them losing their own or customer data. They all said the same thing: Do not use or trust OneDrive.

IIRC one of the funnier examples was users, their managers, and so on all the way up the chain (perhaps including HR and Legal) being let go resulting in there being no user to transfer the ownership/access to so it was simply deleted.

This sounds very reasonable. If you stop paying then they stop serving you. Am I missing something?

In an enterprise environment onedrive is perfectly fine. Yet so many developers think they're to good for it. They save their things outside of onedrive and low and behold they lose data. Its so dumb and im yet to hear a good reason why they couldnt have used onedrive.

I am on an enterprise environment. I had non stop issues with OneDrive, such as OneDrive process always pegged at 100% CPU, files not synching, files going cloud-only and inaccessible without Internet, and issues in git repos. I go out of my way to avoid OneDrive at any cost, including the cost of using a separate backup system for my files.

dont look at CPU in windows. There is always something cranking it to 100% thats just how windows 11 is.

Lo and behold*

Git folders doesn't go well with onedrive.

I'm not against getting help from AI when writing, but at least take some time to make sure it's not place-filler slop.

AI;DR: Starting from early July 2026, all associated data will be deleted 12 Months after a user license is removed.

Nah, this is just slop.

Took me 10 seconds to find this better link: https://mc.merill.net/message/MC1381110

That happened to me many yeas ago with Dropbox.

I had all my old android's phone gallery there and many years ago. I tried getting them and they were all removed. All my memories removed.

Pretty fair... if you don't pay, the data doesn't stay

Cough up the dough, or away your files will go.

"Your OneDrive data..."

No, it's not my OneDrive data. What an infuriatingly click-bait title.

It's OneDrive data for individaul user accounts at organisations that are unlicensed (probably, as the article says, for people that have left).

I'm also unsure what they wanted Microsoft to do. Just store data that apparently doesn't belong to anyone anymore forever?

OneDrive turns itself on after an update so what you think is local data can easily become cloud data. Then while you're not paying attention to a long running system they quietly delete it. Then folks like you come out of the woodwork to defend them. It's hilarious.

What system would still be storing this locally long after the user has left the company?

The second half of your comment is bordering on a personal attack and not very helpful.

You are the example I was pointing out. At no point did I say anything about a company account. This happens on all windows machines. You can for example login to a machine acting as a server simply to use the Microsoft store to install something only to have it start syncing your files to that machine or even intermingle them and then force you to go through a tedious clean up process.

I have seen grandparents accidently lose all their files because they didn't know their files were being synced and then when they removed the Microsoft account from their machine suddenly their files are missing. Situations where they were told by support to logout / login only to lose all their data. These people take weeks or months to finally get someone's attention about the problem irl and these are precisely the types of people who will now be losing data because of the cavalier attitude from the so called experts.

That sounds awful and it's indefensible.

But it's not the subject of this article. Making this particular change sound like a problem, when it isn't (as far as I can tell), only makes it harder to understand where there are genuine issues.

Then the actual issue is that OneDrive syncs deactivated (empty) accounts to your system, deleting the offline files as well..?

I've seen all sorts of situations. The problem is that after updates OneDrive tends to turn itself on or enable syncing when it was previously disabled without telling you. Or you use a Microsoft account to install something through their store and bam suddenly the local drive is intermingled with yours. It's a mess precisely because it's built in.

Don't use Microsoft OneDrive. They mine your data and share it with the US government. And - as the International Criminal Court staff has recently discovered - they will cut you off from your data if they, or the US government, decide they don't like you.

Here is one approach for the frustrated end user forced to deal with OneDrive: Create a local user account and do all your work in there. Periodically manually upload important folders to your OneDrive workspace. Manually upload relevant files to shared team folders. Keep the Microsoft Edge browser as your SharePoint workspace. Work on shared Office artifacts through the Edge browser. Use Chrome or Firefox for everything else.

Results may vary depending on your organization's configuration and policies. You may get labeled as a rogue employee.

But if you keep code synced with GitHub, keep Confluence docs updated, stay responsive when shared docs need your input, people might never notice.

Just came back to work today to find that OneDrive lost me almost all of Friday’s work. My changes are nowhere to be found in “previous version”. OneDrive is such a mess.

Joke of a company

This will cause some major headaches.

there is a reason MSFT is down and not recovering. No matter the product, no one ever has anythi g good to say about microsoft. How can they be sooo bad at litterally everything and stay in business?

OneDrive already deletes files randomly... This only makes it worse.

I'm really confused by the article. What the hell does unlicensed mean? Does unlicensed means free (as in free personal onedrive accounts)?

OneDrive itself should have expired years ago.

Protip: rclone[0] is the easiest way to get all your stuff out of OneDrive.

I did it about a year ago now and haven't looked back.

Just make sure you're running the latest rclone version, I had some major issues with Debian Stable's version failing in weird ways.

[0] https://rclone.org

I wonder why FTP is not enough?

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