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Analyzed from 4465 words in the discussion.
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#onedrive#files#data#microsoft#user#sharepoint#folder#drive#network#backup
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 4465 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
Discussion (154 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft has a long history of messing with user files (Sharepoint checkout to "My Documents" wherever "My Documents" points today. Avoid at all cost.
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?
There may be an option to Always keep on this device, which might help.
Having git tied to a one drive folder is diabolical. We might aswell move back to SVN at that stage.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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...
Not necessarily blaming you for the relationship fault, but someone forcing using the software improperly isn't really a failure of the software.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
All of these kinds things need protection against data loss and centralized control+management, not just the user folder alone.
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.
I highly doubt that the need to steal as much data and media from people to train AI was a problem nobody really had.
Also that came out 10-13 years ago... way before AI. Why are people on this site such midwits?
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.
Laptop drives are still 256 or 512GB in office work.
No real need to pay for "higher subs"
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.
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...).
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.
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.
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".
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 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/
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/unlicensed-oned...
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.
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.
Google/Apple sync everything in the background so Microsoft wanted to do it as well.
More HN comments, less reddit comments, please.
Git folders doesn't go well with onedrive.
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.
AI;DR: Starting from early July 2026, all associated data will be deleted 12 Months after a user license is removed.
Took me 10 seconds to find this better link: https://mc.merill.net/message/MC1381110
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).
The second half of your comment is bordering on a personal attack and not very helpful.
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)
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.
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.
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