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.
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.