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.
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.
To be fair, the DOD uses a different version of Windows than you, me, or any average company, with a custom set of agreements with Microsoft, a bunch of debloating of Windows-specific apps and the addition of a bunch of military/government apps.
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.
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.
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
"fictional AI CP" isn't a thing. AI is trained on existing data. It does not create new stuff. If you want AI to generate CP then you have to train it on CP.
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.
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.
Introduce new changes.
Screw it up royalty.
Fix the features that are salvageable and revert most of the remaining except: Double down on the shitty ones that they think will make them more money.
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.
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.
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
somebody who has worked at these types of companies
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.
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 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 is all over, over and over and over again with all this bullshit.
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.
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
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$'s bullshit you read about weekly. It can be tricky to find the .iso, so it would be a real shame if people wasted their time looking for it @ massgrave.dev
It's probably hard to keep up with lol. I'll try my best. It has Edge and Defender ONLY. No cortana, copilot, recall, candy crush bloat or anything similar, .net, vcredist, edgeview/runtime, TPM requirement, online account, secure boot, store, xbox, one drive, winget, nor widgets.
You finish the install and it is BARE. All I do post install is, in regex and gpedit, turn off telemetry.
For my use, Steam installs all the .net and vcredist as needed.
Store and Xbox and the like are available to install via power shell or downloads, but fair warning. Once you do store or M$ 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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
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
There are alternative DAWs but ngl they all make me sad. And some vsts are a nightmare to get running too.
But they are alot better than trying to get fl running on Linux imo. Check out zrythm if you ever have some time to kill. It sounds lile the most promising one.
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
I just don't have to time to figure out which is the right one for me, installing it, configuring it, etc
Ah, then you want Mint.
I mean maybe someone smarter than me can tell me a linux distro that will work with world of warcraft, steam, final fantasy xiv, etc.
Mint, ive had no issue with any of those except WoW, whose issue is that I do not play it to test it. it even handled modded FNV better than Windows ever did once I figure out SteamTinkerLaunch
Dalamud (QuickXIVLauncher) even is on the distro software hub for easy download to your system, works great.
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.
Yeah but I'm a weirdo that actually likes early access games and random indie stuff that rarely works with Linux so a large part of what I like won't work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.