Windows 11 is now automatically enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission
Microsoft quietly changed how folder backup works in the OneDrive app on Windows 11. Now, the OS enables it by default during the initial setup without asking the user for permission.
This bullshit was basically my first experience with Windows 11 when I got a new PC last year. Literally, "Why is my internet so slow? What's this OneDrive thing? Oh, holy shit fucking stop Jesus Christ!"
Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn't set up, without even a prompt telling me it was happening, and no obvious way to make it stop. I didn't even know Windows had added a cloud storage option. I actually had to completely uninstall OneDrive to finally make it stop.
I might have liked having a native backup service in Windows if it was like, "Hey look at this handy cloud storage tool we've added to Windows! Would you like to pick some files to save?" But as it is, it might as well just be another piece of spyware.
There's a big long list of reasons why I hate Windows 11, but this OneDrive shit is the thing that's making me think maybe it's time to ditch Windows for good.
The extra fun part is when it starts removed at you for filling up the cloud storage allotment that you didn't know you were using.
Thankfully I noticed what was going on before it got to that point, but when they start vacuuming up all your files and data like that without telling you and without giving you control over it, you kind of have to assume that whatever is going on is not being done for your benefit.
It'd be hilarious if they did that but your paid for space was too low so they had to cut you off but they had already taken the liberty to delete the files before they synched
What’s the big deal? Microsoft security is top notch. They totally didn’t get p0vvN3d by russia basically twenty minutes ago and have their source code stolen.
It’s why the US gummit is so happy to use micro$quash services.
And y’know even then, who cares if all your data is stolen by state-sponsored cyber crime groups, y’know? M$ has spared no expense to ensure all that data is secured end-to-end with unbreakable encryption even microsoft can’t read! (snkk) Even if they wanted to!
It’s not like they’ve tricked everyone into being data cattle for their giant cloud-ranching operation, to shovel everything into AI and sell the results to anyone at the highest price possible. I mean. We’d have heard something about that if it was the case.
Mean while on windows 10, they are forcing updates with a creepy splash screen when you boot up. Can't exit, can't stop it, basically held hostage. This was on my old surface pro 4. Then the update screwsed everything up and I had to do a system restore....shits bad 👎
Oh god, you reminded me. I had a run in with this recently because my parents got new laptops. 1TB hard drive, should be plenty right? NO! My mom had 15GB of files in her home folders and One Drive was whining constantly to pay them for more space.
It was about an hour of debugging to keep the files safe, extract One Drive from the home folder locations because it had dug in like a virus, and then (after 20 online searches and scouring forums) click the specific toggle in the specific menu to disable One Drive so it would use local files.
I paid for a 1TB computer, why are you forcing me to use your shitty online-only limited-space shit show. Fucks sake.
Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn’t set up
Wait, what?
I mean specifically a cloud storage account. Setting up the computer required me to supply an email address and set a password for microsoft.com. There was nothing in that process that I recall mentioning OneDrive, or that would have suggested every file on my C drive was about to be indiscriminately uploaded to a Microsoft server somewhere. I didn't even know OneDrive was a thing until I had to google how to stop it.
I was having a conversation in another thread a few days ago about the legality of completely fictional AI child porn and how that may be a safer outlet for those individuals as it involves no harm.
It's legal in many countries, but also not legal in many countries.
In the USA, federal law says as long as its not obscene or has serious value its allowed, but really, good luck with those clauses. Then it says, it's also legal unless it's been transmitted by a common carrier, e.g mail, internet.
So, someone might be legally making their own CP so they don't need to cause any abuse, and then Windows without their permission, uploads it to OneDrive.
You know the person making fictional CP would be the one thrown in jail for transmitting it over a common carrier, but maybe we should throw Microsoft in jail for doing that without permission and fucking us all over, over and over and over again with all this bullshit
They're literally stealing your files. They're probably training their AI on anything uploaded to OneDrive. It's not like they even prompted you or gave you the ToS.
...wut
yea well there is no way to guarantee that AI wont spew out CP where the child there looks exactly like a child that it has seen in its training set, i.e a child that really exists. so no go
I once turned that feature on thinking it was an actual backup (copies of my files in the cloud), I remember how angry I was when I found out it wasn't a backup after all and just removed your files from your computer and only made them accessible online.
You're supposed to uncheck the save storage space and download files as you use them option.
You’re supposed to remove windows
This. Files uploaded locally should automatically be synced though.
They made it the default option for businesses that routinely buy computers with less local storage than their users need. Pretty much every company I have worked for.
They then pushed it out hard into the consumer market when SSD came out and the average storage space on lower end models dropped by 75%.
I see why they did it, how they did it was in usual Microsoft fashion, idiotic.
It's sort of their pattern.
You can see their strategy at work here.
It is possible to keep individual files on the local hard drive with different settings (that in my experience never seem to stick past updates).
The default, though, is to take everything on your computer off of your computer, put it into the cloud (their computer), and recommend you pick and choose which ones stay on your computer. In essence, they want you to think of your computer as secondary to their computer. An extension of it.
There is no "your computer", it's just the computer you happen to be logged into at the moment.
The cloud is not something you take advantage of, the cloud is where you live now.
Wtf!
Good thing I use to debloat windows 10 on a local account and got rid of onedrive before it could wreck havok so.
But got to be honest, Far as long as I can remember, I always had backup of important data. Encryption - client side if off to the cloud.
Shit I'm so old that I prefer my music on HDD instead of using streaming services.
Using Linux nowadays too BTW.
First recall, then getting rid of local accounts, and now this.
Might shift back to Linux now.
What would be the final straw
For me? Recall. I'm ordering an SSD to dual boot Linux off of and ween myself off Windows as much as I can. Probably can't remove it as long as I want to play games* with friends, but I'd be happy to have my day to day be less awful.
Before anyone says Proton, Wine, etc, I mean the awful multiplayer rootkits like Valorant.
One of us!
"By involuntarily uploading your data to onedrive you also agree for it to be used in training AI models"
Checkmate, consumer.
Microsoft is getting desperate to steal your IP so they can train their AI.
Can someone sue the living shit out of them and start setting precedents please and thanks.
Can someone sue the living shit out of them
Nope. All in terms of agreement.
IANAL and could be wrong, but it is not the case that the T’s&C’s we all have to agree to aren’t necessarily legally binding, because people can’t be expected to read and understand them all.
With that in mind, it doesn’t matter what the user agrees to if they have no practical alternative available to them.
In civilized countries there is an understanding that noone is reading dozens of pages of terms of agreement, so any clause in there that is unexpected is automatically void. Expecting a software agreement to include rules not to distribute it further, break copy protection mechanisms etc. is normal so those terms are valid. But having all your data stolen is not something to be expected, hence invalid.
The c-levels are really sick of all these new features they're adding and no one is using them because of silly reasons like "they don't work good" or "I can't even see the point of this for me".
In their wisdom, they've taken the option to say no away from the users. Now they have a much easier time justifying their bonus this year, just look at how many users are using their new features!
Yeah they’ll take that bonus and then dip to another company and get a big resignation party and golden parachute while the rest of us stare in amazement
Edit: Grammar is good and stuff
Grammar is good and stuff
How dare you good grammar want
The end can't come soon enough.
This is so fucking true.
Governed by an excel entry.
Begging people to subscribe to their own hardware will have increased results when they can show you your OneDrive is full. It probably will get them more money than it loses them. They are utterly thirsty for subscription revenue.
This has to be a massive GDPR violation?
If I understand it correctly this behavior happens only for newly deployed computers if you sign in with Microsoft account so there are no unexpected uploads to OneDrive, only downloads of your existing files if you used this feature before.
Although once you start saving files you might not realise files are being saved to also OneDrive. All in all it is a weird and dumb change, that popup where you are prompted if you want to enable known folder move was perfectly fine.
bullshit like this is getting worse and worse and is why i moved away from windows.
Same. They've always done this shit, but installing windows - and then uninstalling or disabling all the cooked-in bloat and spyware - has become so ridiculously tiresome that I just said fuck it and went Linux full-time.
Every update or service pack, it starts all over. There's no such thing as a clean windows install.
Nobara was up and running in like ten minutes with no fuckery at all, and it's no nice not having to fight my OS on everything.
What are you running? I tried Ubuntu as my daily driver and honestly found it's user experience pretty shitty. Lots of little buggy issues with the interface and running a few games on steam that support Linux wasn't great
Recently I've found Fedora based distros better than debian (like Ubuntu) based ones, especially on "newer" hardware (https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Hezio/saved/#view=TwZfpg)
For gaming Bazzite literally installs everything you need for you except Proton GE, although Steam's regular Proton isn't bad either for most games.
Fedora and bluefin have been working quite well for me.
Its been their practice since the early 90s. Bundling and defaulting all their shitty apps, then making sure everything else has compatibility issues by design.
The worst thing to happen to Microsoft was the IETF. It shattered their walled garden and forced them to integrate with a host of other internationally developed and encoded systems through a uniform protocol. They've spent the last 30 years trying to claw their position of OS dominance back.
Just a heads up, Windows 11 IoT LTSC is out, and it has none of M$'s bullshit you read about weekly. It can be tricky to find the .iso, so it would be a real shame if people wasted their time looking for it @ massgrave.dev
It's somehow even trickier to find a list of differences between them and regular win 11.
It's probably hard to keep up with lol. I'll try my best. It has Edge and Defender ONLY. No cortana, copilot, recall, candy crush bloat or anything similar, .net, vcredist, edgeview/runtime, TPM requirement, online account, secure boot, store, xbox, one drive, winget, nor widgets.
You finish the install and it is BARE. All I do post install is, in regex and gpedit, turn off telemetry.
For my use, Steam installs all the .net and vcredist as needed.
Store and Xbox and the like are available to install via power shell or downloads, but fair warning. Once you do store or M$ account sign in, copilot and recall might find a way to sneak in via updates. None of them work, and error out when you open them, but the fact they install and exist makes me uneasy.
Edit: If you don't even want Defender, nor Edge, look up Windows X-Lite. That man is a wizard at figuring out the bare minimum needed for an .iso.
Wtf is Microsoft doing?
Phase one: force everyone's data into their OneDrive account. OneDrive now at capacity, you must upgrade to ensure all your data is backed up and retained.
Phase two: MS secretly (or not so secretly) use all this data to train copilot.
Human generated content to feed into ai systems is the new good rush
Not secretly, Dropbox is currently doing that
Rent seeking, theft/copyright infringement, walled garden you can’t escape (if Microsoft holds all your files good luck getting them back on Linux)
Microsoft needs to die.
Oh yeah the OneDrive over capacity thing happened to me with my Xbox Series X I was like “ARE YOU PEOPLE SERIOUS I DONT WANT MY CAPTURES IN ONEDRIVE” but ya know Microsoft makes it hard for us
For starters, bulk copying a person's documents without their approval sounds like mass copyright violation.
If it’s a machine used for business: corporate espionage.
Oh, that's okay though, you signed them the rights to do that by having an account with them
... I'm sure is how they'll spin it
windows 11 has a onedrive sync service that is almost impossible to disable even with group policy and all that.
I tried to make a clean image of the OS that could be booted from the network. never again.
Since you use group policies and images (even if images are outdated nowadays) I assume you are trying to configure this for a company with an AD domain and M365 licenses. Since you couldn't use group policies with a domain and you can't use M365 features like OneDrive without licenses. I hope you are not allowing personal accounts..
Why wouldn't you use OneDrive in this case?
It's much better than the old way of home folders in a file share.
Anyway I'm half tempted to try and do it myself because I doubt it's impossible.
Its called Linux Mint. Easier to install than windows, significantly cheaper, and frankly easier to configure.
One problem: not compatible with Windows. Of course you can use Wine and similar stuff, but isn't 100%, especially not when you're developing for Windows. Also there's the issue of NVidia drivers (I won't sell/throw into the trash my GTX1050 just because NVidia doesn't want to make their drivers open source), and also a lot of pro audio stuff isn't available on Linux.
also these idiots made onedrive folders mimic the original documents folder, also setting default to onedrive folder, so when i search for the downloaded content in my profile, documents i just WTF as its empty...
I hate this so much. I save as a new file for a new version. I expect it to go into the same folder by default like the file i currently opened and worked on. Nope, onedrive it is if you aren't careful.
Microsoft Data Theft as a Service
At this point, Microsoft is becoming an advertisement for Linux.
I finally switched to Linux Mint a few weeks ago. CoPilot/ Recall was the last straw.
Been using Mint for about a month now on my daily laptop. It's nice, not having to deal with windows' bullshit, but on the other hand I've had a number of issues with it; most recently, it sort of reboots itself every so often randomly. That, and issues with not being able to hear high fidelity audio on a bluetooth headset while also using the headset's mic (there's a codec that let's me use both mic and audio, but the audio is low quality).
Usually though issues get fixed with an update, just gotta check the update manager often.
Had this happen to me some time ago. I hated it so much.
Win10 ending, copilot and this shit. Finally pushed me over. Going to order a new ssd and install mint on my main rig.
I'm seeing that a hell of a lot this year... Linux might actually finally make some real headwind with the tech crowd
I installed Fedora as a dual boot 2 months ago, and I haven't once booted up Windows in that time. Everything just worked. Now that I feel a bit more confident I'm going to wipe the entire drive and try Fedora Atomic.
So how many Windows refugees will end up fleeing to the Kingdom of Torvalds?
I’m extremely close at this point.
Give it a go, it was surprisingly not as big an issue as I thought it would be, even for gaming (though not perfect for gaming, I've been able to get things working without too much headache at least)
Do it!
I just turned it off as it kept removed about the storage being full.
I don't need you bish, fuck off.
Oohh, that's a good way to potentially break this. Just download a ton of useless stuff and upload it onto OneDrive. People could make this service really expensive for Microsoft.
So, yeah. What's a good Linux distro for stable diffusion and programming?
It just comes down to personal preference. Mint is usually recommended as a good starting point.
Fedora or Mint should be the most hassle-free
All of them.
Biggest difference a distro does is their update cycle and how much the distro "takes care" of you. Some of them do everything behind the scenes to make it just work. Others need more user interaction to reach the same state (but tend to teach you the inner workings too, which will open up a LOT of customization)
How much time do you want to spend on linux os maintenance?
Debian
Not a whole lot.
And this is why nobody trusts windows
Windows has always been trash. People use it because it usually comes with the machine.
Windows 3.1 - 98 weren't too bad. Windows 95 was massive and people queued to buy boxed copies, so far from just using it because it came with the machine. Windows used to have actual fans, people that enjoyed using the OS
Windows users are like abuse victims at this point.
No news is good news.
Microsoft is doing an amazing job keeping me off selling windows 11!
Keep up the great work!
Guess it's time for Linux and for me to give up gaming :/
I game on Linux. Go check protondb for compatibility with your favourite game
I switched to Linux last week and I haven't had any issues with my Steam games. Just had to turn on the setting to have Steam provide Linux support for games that don't provide it themselves.
P R O T O N
I'm gonna start sounding like a shill, but check out Nobara. Painless install, steam games just work out of the box.
I have to use Outlook for work. It is so annoying to have to avoid the one drive attachment option everytime I attach a file to an email. Nobody wants to be forced to deal with that crap.
I legit don't understand why this exists. Why would anyone want a bunch of shit in their OneDrive to have a permanent link?
Microsoft just loves money at the expense of quality products.
How does anyone put up with using that OS? It’s 2024, it’s time to move on. Sheesh
The only two things making me use windows for now are my inability to run FL Studio on Linux (I tried before, I'll try again)
Procrastination to go through my files to see if there's something worth backing up before I wipe my drive
Check out Ardour for music production 👍
These days it's best to use Windows on computer where you need it for a specific application, and another machine for your desktop. Sometimes with a switch so you can use the same keyboard/mouse/monitor
I know someone who uses one of those beelink minis or similar as a dedicated machine to run their 3d printer because the company doesn't support Linux as well as Windows.
It sucks to have to keep your nice production machine separate from your desktop, but it really beats the headache of virtualization or dual booting
There are way too many nice features on Windows that don't exist or are time consuming to set up on Linux. My only pain point on Windows, other than the stupid pop-ups advertising other services, are the fact that I can't install individual GNU tools like nano easily.
😬yuck
Microsoft just seems to be trying various methods of shooting itself in the foot.
I guess maybe they really didn’t learn from the 80s/90s….
They're gambling that it won't be enough to drive the majority of users to other operating systems.
It's not much of a gamble. Most of their users won't notice or care.
How do I get banned from OneDrive? Upload shit tons of garbage to clog their drives? I know they could probably add more space faster than I can upload but it would still make me happy to slowly feed them useless files that only take up space.
There's a quota, so unless you have a few hundred million dollars laying around, it's a futile fight.
This might actually be a very good idea.
My first thought was to abuse something that rhymes with "Mild Topography". But that would likely lead to legal repercussions for both you and Microsoft. A better solution would be to store hundreds of medical records in your Documents folder. You have a right to store your own medical information. If Microsoft is uploading those to their servers without your consent, and without appropriate HIPAA measures, that smells like an extremely silver-wrapped lawsuit.
The answer is incompressible noise. Hours of full on 8k video and 7.1 channel DTS of pure noise. There's noise designed specifically to being incompressible and unable to deduplicate. I think some podcasts got in trouble with Spotify for something like this.
Make sure it's all encrypted files so they can't compress it.
I got a new laptop at work and everything, every file I worked in, was creating a second copy of itself on OneDrive. It was so annoying and took awhile but I found instructions on deleting the duplicates.
It took all the files off my local machine and left the ones on OneDrive.
Aaaargh!
Yeah, it did this to me a few months back. Got the files back local eventually but it was a big pain in my arse. If I had time to learn another os I'd already be gone. Seems like Microsoft is determined to asset-strip whatever good reputation their product had left.
If you start with something like PopOS, Linux Mint, or Universal Blue the learning curve shouldn't be too high.
Let be honest here, a majority of users have their mobile devices backup automatically. They will see this in the same way....
My phone asked me first.
Just that I don't have anything worthwhile on my phone. All the important stuff is on PCs. All the stuff that is professional, that is covered by NDAs, all the banking. And just because Microsoft has ever been shitty and is now going extra-shitty, it is not a Windows PC.
Just wait until some Microsoft digital parrot AKA artificial "intelligence" spouts some companies internal data that it had gobbled up somewhere from the companies internal network...
Same here. I don't have anything important, and my contacts are in a vcf file whenever I need it.
I got both google and xiaomi do that on the same phone, it sure was a hassle to remove both without losing my data...
And yet people will just shrug it off and keep using windows. And Microsoft loves that.
take ownership then deny everyone. if folder is deleted it will reappear
Real question here: has anyone else had luck side-stepping the Live365 signup during/after install? I've done this, and I'm very confused that more people haven't.
iirc when going through the setup after a fresh install, I used sign in and typed in an email like fake@email.com with a keysmashed password. Because it’s obviously not an actual account and with a password that wouldn’t be correct, it’ll say as much but still let you continue into windows without signing in. Hope that helps
This stopped working about 1 month ago. OOBE\BYPASSNRO method can be used to create local account.
Oddly enough, OneDrive is the least of my problems with windows. It’s pretty handy at work since I have to juggle tasks between multiple PCs. My only hang up with Linux is games, which is odd since time wise I don’t spend most of my time there.
Recently switch to NextCloud.
So far so far.
Lately, Windows 11 has been a one sussy baka. Windows, I don't know, man, it's almost like we have an impostor among us.
That would only work if you log in with a Microsoft account.
Nobody I know does that.
You must not know all that many people. Windows is pushing accounts super hard. Average user is complying with this. Ask your fish monger or barista , bet one of them has a m$ account.
I don't know any average user who does their own Windows installs.
Usually they just ask some tech friend for help, and they know how to do it without an MS account.
Until it becomes mandatory. Foot in the door is a powerful play.
