Micro$oft when I try to enjoy my local drive in peaC:\

I love my jobs implementation of onedrive. It copies files from my hardrive, erases the local copy, and then loses the remote version.
- Microsoft ate my homework
  
  I died with this hahahahha
- Just activate the option to keep a local copy, right click the folder your files are in and choose "keep local copy"
  
  "your administrator has restricted your ability to change this setting"
  
  You say this like it makes sense that this functionality isn't the default. Why the fuck does that make sense to you?!
  
  Thanks! It was "Always keep on this device" but I didn't know that was an option. I was able to fully download a folder where individual items could not be retrieved. Awesome!

I recently wasted multiple evenings going through this with my partner's photos on both OneDrive and Google. It was a nightmare, trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.
I ended up doing a full backup from the cloud to an external drive and unplugging it just to be sure, then carefully using the awful web interfaces to delete a bunch of photos and videos from the cloud after deactivating all the auto-backup "options", which is apparently the only way to do it without also wiping your local media. There doesn't seem to be any way to do it while using the "service" normally on the device; any attempt to delete from the cloud will also delete your local copy.
People have called me paranoid for seeking out and removing/deactivating these "services" with extreme prejudice on my own devices, but this experience was even worse than I'd imagined.
- Yeah, such a service, deleting your files!
  I ran into a fun one where both google and Xiaomi backed up my photos, that was a nightmare to save and clean out. They would write back deleted files (hey look we restored your list files!) and the other service would back them up again lol.
  It's almost as it's not meant to be useful but a trap to fall into eh.
- trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.
  ...and that's Microsoft's entire game. Get old people to pay more for higher tiers of storage because your mom doesn't understand why she has no storage left for the family picnic photos.

Linux, people... Linux!
- Eventually, they're gonna make changing the OS illegal and burn in windows into the hardware. Welcome to the world of tomorrow! 🙃
  
  And that’s the point where I’ll go off the grid

A reminder that if your data is not backed up in a different physical location, then it is not safe.
- Reminder that you should choose where to back up to, not Microsoft.
  
  Agreed, but most people don't backup at all. Then complain very loudly when they lose everything and blame everyone else other than themselves. Saw it daily fixing people's phones.
  The technically inclined were the worst offenders, they always felt like they knew better than the defaults but they never actually set anything up.
  OneDrive sucks but it is better than losing everything because your shit suddenly dies.
- Depends on the data, some data would be fine being deleted but not fine being leaked, some the other way around.
- And also if you don't try to restore your backups from time to time, you may actually not have any backups.

microsoft: hey lets set up onedrive and make it your new documents folder for everything on your computer
also microsoft: oh yeah you only get 15gb unless you pay more but we won't tell you that and once full you can't use your documents folder

TRY AGAIN IN THREE DAYS

This sounds like a problem I'm too Linux to understand
- I am almost 100% ubuntu, but working in home office and remoting to use my three monitor setup from work (windows) at home is a nightmare. Remmina is the best at the moment and she laggy as, and getting it to use all three screens at work, at home...... Nightmare
  
  Never found remmina to be laggy but never tried with 3 monitors. Still sounds better than what I had to do when i had to work from home a few years ago. I had to run a windows vm, to log in to citrix at work (didn't work directly in Linux for me then) to then remote desktop into servers and work in emacs there. It was virtualization hell. It worked but oh boy was everything laggy.. Should have gone one deeper and ran my linux on a hypervisor for a true beauty of a setup.

I'm gonna go buy a copy of Linux
- buy
  What is this word?
  
  I miss boxed copies of Linux $50 and you got a thick book with it.
  
  I, too, shoplift my install USB’s. /s
  
  You're really missing out if you're not buying Ubuntu Pro.
- I will sell you my copy. DM me, I'll give you a deal

Why MIcrosoft can't develop a good desktop app when they have a huge amount of money and loads of staff. Not to mention owning the operating system a majority of people use, meaning the app, syncing, backing up, etc. can be super optimised for it without any fuss for using workarounds. NO MS, PUTTING ALL MY FILES INTO A "OneDrive" FOLDER IS NOT A GOOD IDEA. WHY IS THERE TWO OF THEM??? "OneDrive" and "OneDrive - [org name]"???? WHAT??? AND YOUR TASKBAR ICON THING FOR ONEDRIVE IS ANNOYING. WHY CAN'T I QUIT ONEDRIVE WITHOUT OPENING THE MENU?????????
Thankfully I switched to more competent cloud providers. pCloud is pretty good, they just sync your files. No stupid "moving all your folders into a pcloud folder and making two of them one of which is empty for some reason". Super duper simple. And pcloud definitely has many times less budget and staff than MS. Jottacloud is also great, pretty similar to pcloud in that it only syncs files. WHY ARE THESE MUCH SMALLER COMPANIES DOING A WAY BETTER JOB THAN MS???????
- The reason MS puts all the main folders in onedrive is because users are tech illiterate. Most dont understand they need to place files into a special directory to be swished away to the cloud service. I know, because I've done the same thing when i setup my parents pc with linux... no matter how many times i explain "just place the files in this folder to automatically synced" all their files just up in the standard home directories never to be synced. I ended up just symbolic linking the home directory to one in the cloud directory. >_>
  Now how MS managed to even fucked that up.... well thats a whole other story.
  
  that makes sense...but why is there two of them? That's really weird. And I don't think they want you to quit OneDrive...
  Also, since they own the operating system (Windows), they could easily just sync the folders directly. (Documents, Pictures, Desktop, Music, and Videos) That's where most people put their files in, so why not just sync that? Why move everything into a special OneDrive directory with all the issues that comes with that?

The cloud is just someone elses computer, you could pay 19.99 a year for 100 gbs of storage on some shady corporations server somewhere for them to inevitably jack up the price. Or you could not be an idiot and buy a 128 gb flash drive for 14.99 one time and have that storage forever.
- Flashdrives are not forever storage. Flashdrives corrupt literally all the time. And old flashdrives that sit around also corrupt while not in use. If you care about your data, store that data in multiple places. Follow the data hygiene rules. 3 2 1: 3 copies of the data, on 2 different storage mediums, with 1 copy off-site.
  
  Got it so buy a second drive, and pay $15/mo to the cloud storage company.
  
  forever is a long time. distributed copies might last beyond my time. eh
  
  You think you can do better for 15 dollars go ahead.
- buy the 32g thumbs for about $5. load with mp3s-4s and give as gifts. for backups
- TBF that's forever until your house burns down with it inside
  
  or the drive wasn't plugged in for a long time, causing the flash storage to degrade

Something, something, Linux, something, something, autism.
- dd -of /dev/null

Bro, I had just reinstalled windows and I moved my backup folder straight to my desktop, then left. I get an alert like two hours later saying my onedrive is full. What? Go back and the copy failed. I can excuse it automatically backing stuff up because people don't understand anything, but to cancel my local transfer is insane. I was livid. OneDrive is cancer.

Would actively fuck apps up because it would register as a file touch and break things that expected unchanged file content

Yeah, my factory windows install died and refused to boot up, because I spent too long without creating an account or some ransom shit like that...I was sad for a second...then I booted back to Debian as I do every day :))
- I've never had an account.. not sure what weirdness you experienced but I've never once been pestered or asked for a login. Infact, the only thing I get is the 'lets finish setting up windows' full screen trash, which is just a window and I can alt-f4 to close. It's been years like that.
  
  But housing it behind a key combination is malicious for the average user.

As soon as I saw that mustache I wanted to get out my knife as well.
- Hey, moustaches make you a better programmer

now to be fair, you can organize your onedrive too
- I don't want to.

This is one thing I still can't seem to rid myself of with Windows 10. Is there something in the Windows 10 Pro group policy thing I can do to send OneDrive back to hell from whence it came? I've only managed to get my files to save to a directory not controlled by it, however the quick links to media folders still point to the one drive folder even after manually changing them numerous times.
- I'm confused. Are you logged in to OneDrive?
  I mean, don't get me wrong, I loathe OneDrive. It's the flakiest, most unreliable piece of software in MS's current end-user-focused stable...
  ...but it still needs you to log in. If you log out from OneDrive it does nothing. It's a separate login from the Windows login, too, if you've used one of those to install Windows.
  I genuinely haven't used Win10 in enough time I don't recall if it gave you more notifications to re-enable it, but after refusing to log in and taking OneDrive out of my startup tasks I don't think it's come up again on any of my Windows devices.
  
  Can confirm. I have never had W10P bug me about OneDrive. I don't have, nor will I ever have an account for microshit. Local user only. All files stored locally and have never been promoted to do otherwise.
  
  I don't even have a login for it, let alone try to use it. What it has done, however, has made itself the standard "My Documents" folder in the user profile. I am not using it for anything, I have that all on a totally separate drive and mostly everything correctly points to the new destination I have for My Documents, My Games, My Videos, etc.
  However, I can not get the Quick Links on the left side of an explorer window to stick to the new destination. It keeps reverting back to the OneDrive folder within the user folder so using them just sends me to an empty folder.
  
  The login is now unskippable and part of the OS setup.
- I managed to kill it on my home PC years ago.

Undesirables = tech ceos

I can totally relate. I went and built a NAS then installed Proxmox on it to then create a VM for TrueNAS in which i then created a docker for Nextclound. Then I installed Arch on a different VM and used Nextcloud sync so I can have access to my files on my laptop that also runs Arch. Humblebrag over, I apologize for trying to relate to a windows user.

My end user had three documents.
In oneDrive, localised to Spanish
In oneDrive, still in English
The actual document folder
Guess where they put all the files that I wanted to be put in /documents?

I remember having a 90$ Android phone that was also loaded with bloatware.
- I'd like to find a phone that isn't, mine is certainly full of crap I don't want.
  
  try https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-android-debloater-next-generation
  
  Use an open source android ROM like lineageOS

Windows 11 finally allows you to simply uninstall OneDrive. Before that you had to do weird registry hacks, that often broke something :-/
- "Yay, they finally allows access to my machine that I bought and paid for... 🫠"
  a few minutes later...
  "Wait what now? They added WHAT? 😱 ("Copilot" AI 🤮)"
  
  You can also remove copilot

Almost all the new hires at work save shit to one drive and teams and it's incredibly annoying to locate anything. Just save it to the dang shared drive.
- I had to force people in our lab to use the shared drive, they were all so resistant to it for some reason. Lo and behold they love it now because its easy to share stuff and you can use any computer to get it.

OneDrive: fuck no you’re not doing that shit

Man, with the Linux users on one side and daddy Microsoft high on the cloud, C: don’t get no respect!

ms permmisions tricks... take ownership of it's folder. delete other perms. everyone denied. gets an error and doesn't start. done
- And people say you have to be a hacker to use Linux.
- I just uninstalled it on my work pc. I got fed up when certain applications saved a cache to somewhere in %APPDATA% that got backed up every Tuesday. The apps then saw the cache changed and attempted to reconcile the changes and corrupted my work.
  Never again.
  
  ms backup has never worked. onedrive will come back until you trip it and let it think it's already installed. btdt

OOAPB says go away and o&o shutup10 says shut up. Coupled with winutil power shell script you can take control of the your macroshaft product.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/ooappbuster https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
- "Just run these scripts with admin access to protect yourself from data mining and bloatware."
  #JustWindowsThings
  
  Good. You understand.

And in a million years, people will still do everything possible except install Linux. Ubuntu is 20 years old and it was already a decent alternative to Windows back then. People are idiots and we shouldn't be sorry for them.
- I always find it funny how people act as if there is literally no reason in existence to keep using windows.
  It literally just shows us your ignorance and insulation from the real world.
  
  Please tell me because I have been using Windows at home and at work for more than 30 years and I still believe that most people only need Firefox and LibreOffice.
- You know, some people's work needs software that doesn't run on Linux. (Adobe in my case, and yes, the Linux-compatible alternatives are missing important features.)
  Also anti-cheat in online games often doesn't support Linux.
  Those are the main reasons I'm still sticking to Windows, but at least I 🏴‍☠️ it lol.
  
  Windows vm for adobe shit... and these days, only kernel level anticheats dont work for linux. (And lets be honest, good.)
- Not back then no. I could install windows and get it running but not ubuntu and connect to internet. Now linux is flat out better than windows, only issue remaining being proprietary software.

Right click tray icon > Settings > Manage backup > Turn off backup for all the folders...
That's it, all your folders become local only. Then if you don't want it running just disable auto-startup in task manager.
I guess it's more popular to hate than to learn things...
- The fact that it’s opt-out and not opt-in says a lot about windows.
  I guess it's more popular to hate than to learn things...
  Sure is, look at all that hate this little guy 🐧 gets for example
- No one should have to do that stupid shit, it should be opt in only. The only reason for this model is to trick idiots into buying a subscription they never wanted or needed.
- Its not like Microsoft advertises this - they explicitly obfuscate and make things opt out
- Windows® Just Works™
  "But I don't want to learn how to set things up, I just want it to work, now how do I set up this windows pc?"
- Yeah, it's very easy... as long as it's working, which it is not, at all.