When Windows users suddenly discover that their files have vanished from their desktops after interacting with OneDrive, the issue often stems from how Microsoft’s cloud service integrates with the operating system. The automatic, near-invisible shift to cloud-based storage has triggered strong reactions from users who find the feature unintuitive and, in some cases, destructive to their local files.
Happened to me at work where they force us to use Windows 11. I had turned on the autosave feature on a Word document I was working on. Little did I know this meant it stopped saving the changes locally and started saving them on a OneDrive copy. I then worked all day on that file.
The next day I notice the file on OD, find it odd that it is there so I delete it because I want nothing to do with OD. I then open the local word file and realize that none of the work I did the day prior was saved.
I figured out what happened and fortunately the file was still in the recycle bin. But fuck that whole system to begin with. It won’t even let me use the autosave feature locally.
Its been years since being able to save files on my laptop hard drive for work. Its all onedrive. The company uses it as protection - if the laptop is stolen theres no proprietary data on the drive. It also ensures if my laptop breaks all my work is intact.
The autosave feature is also linked to allowing several people to work on documents simultaneously. This is probably related to forcing onedrive use. You can share links to the files, and being able to edit simultaneously is useful. If you turn off autosave like I tend to do sometimes then when others open the file at the same time you all end up with your own version and cant see what the others are doing.
At home I use linux. I got fed up ages ago with MS stealing my files.
I dont get why you’d avoid using onedrive in a work environment.
Go beat your IT department with hammers. I have roughly a decade in IT with primarily Windows in our environment. There’s no reason for it to suck so bad in a corporate environment. They can disable it entirely very easily, or make it work amazingly well with some effort.
My workplace:
We redirect/sync My Documents and My Pictures to OneDrive seamlessly. If it’s saved in either of those, autosave is on and it’s the same file locally and on onedrive. Files saved follow to any machine. Viewable in explorer always, actually downloaded locally on the fly as needed. Obvious overlaid icon on every file to indicate if it’s synced, syncing, or not available locally (when you’re offline and can’t connect to one drive). You can right click files and folders to easily adjust if they’re always downloaded up to date locally or just on demand.
If there are any conflicts it can’t auto-merge (usually only non-office docs) it saves them with the source computer name appended to the end of the file name so you have each version available, and it pops up a notification that stays until it is manually dismissed, so you know it happened.
If for some reason you’re working on a document outside of the synced folders, office programs do not default to saving in one drive, they default to where the document was opened from or to “My Documents” for new docs, so shit doesn’t get silently moved on you. I can and have had the same doc opened on multiple machines at once, made edits on each, and it worked just like live collaboration with other users.
It doesn’t have to suck, and it’s also easily disableable entirely in enterprise environments if your IT doesn’t want to configure it well. We kept it entirely disabled from our environment until we had our config planned and thoroughly tested with a pilot group for a few months before we let it hit the company as a whole.
Our work does basically all of that…and I hate it. I can’t connect to the corporate One Drive without also being on the corporate VPN since it stores it all on the corporate Share Point server.
They have it set up so it auto deletes everything more than 2 years old. It doesn’t delete folders…so if you don’t look at something frequently all the sudden you just have a bunch of empty folders. Lost my entire ‘Useful SQL queries’ folder contents this way. I wrote them years ago…still useful but because I didn’t change them and just ran them. They’re deleted…WTF?
So now I get to go into the recycle bin in SharePoint and recover files it decided to delete every week. I’m so glad this is ‘saving me time’ and ‘preventing me from losing files’. I’ve lost more files to One Drive in the last year than in the last 20 of just using my local hard drive.
No… then they don’t do what I’m talking about. I’m sorry you deal with the suck, but your IT team still gets hammers.
My workplace backs up to OneDrive itself. No requirement of work VPN, just sign in on a work machine with internet connection and confirm the MFA prompt.
Technically OneDrive is some unholy patchwork on top of Sharepoint Online, as evidenced by a ton of back end settings going through the SharePoint admin UI, but that’s not relevant to the discussion.
I didn’t even know it was possible to hijack Onedrive to point to SharePoint Server. For that matter who in the absolute fuck is still using Sharepoint Server? It went out of support two years ago, and extended support (at significantly extra cost) ends July 14th.
There is technically another On-Prem version past 2019, but it’s obvious bare minimum life support.
Plus, Microsoft locks so many of their security and other features baked into Azure behind Office 365 E5 licenses that most places are just using those for Office etc, and those come with a shit ton of storage per-user in OneDrive and SharePoint online.
We also don’t have auto-deletion turned on (yet). I’ve already done what I can to talk my boss out of it, but we will have options to prevent it on specific files and folders, as we already do with email (auto delete past certain age, unless it’s in the archove folder. you can set up auto archive rules if you need, but there’s rules on max space).
TL;DR- Your workplace does not in fact do “essentially what I described”, which is a large contributor to the issues you’ve seen. Go get hammers and beat your IT staff with them.
Especially the Sharepoint Server shit. That’s horrifying. No one should have to even think about touching that. Ewwww.
I work for a huge organization and my local IT guys have their hands bound. I couldn’t even make a ripple in that ocean even if I tried.
I’m sorry, that sucks. It really only takes about ten minutes to search up the settings to turn off the saving redirection in Office programs and toss it in the default Group Policy settings, but I’m sure that at a huge org that would end up stuck in absurd change review hell that IT folk seem to try and avoid.
the thing is… you shouldn’t have to “search up the settings to turn off the saving redirection in Office programs and toss it in the default Group Policy settings”. cloud shit in windows and ms office needs to be optional, and explicitly opt in
I don’t disagree, but corps are going to push the settings in their software and products that makes them the most money. It sucks but should be expected.
It’d be better if there were competitve open source options with the same ease of use, of implementation at scale, and ease of management at scale, but unless you’re willing to do custom forking and dev work, most of the time it’s easier to go with whatever is the overwhelming standard is and work around the rough spots, as at least then you’ll almost never be in completely uncharted waters.
I spent a few years building a custom solution for integrating a semi-popular but still relatively new HRIS system with a hybrid AD/Entra environment with a somewhat unique hybrid Exchange (email) setup. Doing it live, no real documentation to speak of because the few other places that had done it turn out to be consulting groups that sell their solutions for ridiculous amounts of money. My workplace has now hired an entire team and spent at least half a mil on a new software suite that will replace my solution eventually, after more dev work by this new team.
That was after I burned a year trying to figure out how in the hell I could programatically try to clean up a horribly misconfigured and mismanaged old SolarWinds Orion setup that had accumlated tech debt for years, only to be stymied because they don’t allow public discussion of their fucking database structure, and what I found out myself was batshit. Don’t trust software that use their own custom bastardization of SQL.
After those experiences I’m pretty damn content to stay in the land of “well documented and popular” and just work around the rough edges. Keeping up with patch and update news and delaying updates a little usually gives plenty of time to effectively opt-out by changing the settings before it hits our environment at large.
Fuck Microsoft’s bullshit, but at some point it’s the enemy you know, especially in a corporate environment. I’m no stranger to masochism through tech work, but I’ve gotten used to MS’s brand of fuckery, as a lot of us have.
I have similar issue with Google.
At some point I used to use Google Photos backups. I wanted to delete the backed up files, but there’s no way to do that. It would also delete them from the devices.
And I guess it checks them based on hash, because even in the main view it always figures out where the files are currently stored, if on device, even after I moved them elsewhere. Otherwise these other images only show up in their respective folders, not the main view.
I had trouble like this too, so what I’ve done is just give up on using Google photos in any meaningful way.
I still sync to it as a temporary backup, but I periodically copy all media from my device to my local home storage as the true copy.
I have yet to implement a proper open-source alternative for photo organization, but hopefully that’ll be one of the projects completed this year.
One of the problems I was having was that I wanted to take photos that I did not want to sync to Google photos, and yeah just deleting them from Google photos would delete them from my device as well. to get around this, you can force quit the application on your phone, work with the photos however you want, and then restart the application. as long as the photos aren’t in a location you have set to sync to Google photos, it should be fine. also sorry to my coworker who had to see a whole row of photos of my dogs disgusting butthole with a ruptured anal gland before I figured that out.
Just in case you’ve not heard of it, I can highly recommend Immich. If you’re familiar with Docker it’s incredibly easy to set up, and even if you’re not it’s not that complicated.