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.
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.
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.
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.
forever is a long time. distributed copies might last beyond my time. eh
Got it so buy a second drive, and pay $15/mo to the cloud storage company.
I love my jobs implementation of onedrive. It copies files from my hardrive, erases the local copy, and then loses the remote version.
Microsoft ate my homework
Just activate the option to keep a local copy, right click the folder your files are in and choose “keep local copy”
Thanks! It was “Always keep on this device” but I didn’t know that was an option. I was able to fully download a folder where individual items could not be retrieved. Awesome!
You say this like it makes sense that this functionality isn’t the default. Why the fuck does that make sense to you?!
The idea is that you can have more data online than you can fit on your computer.
It makes sense for SharePoint when there can easily be enough data to cause space problems on employee computers.
It doesn’t really make sense for it to be the default for personal OneDrives though.
Almost all the new hires at work save shit to one drive and teams and it’s incredibly annoying to locate anything. Just save it to the dang shared drive.
I had to force people in our lab to use the shared drive, they were all so resistant to it for some reason. Lo and behold they love it now because its easy to share stuff and you can use any computer to get it.
ms permmisions tricks… take ownership of it’s folder. delete other perms. everyone denied. gets an error and doesn’t start. done
And people say you have to be a hacker to use Linux.
I just uninstalled it on my work pc. I got fed up when certain applications saved a cache to somewhere in %APPDATA% that got backed up every Tuesday. The apps then saw the cache changed and attempted to reconcile the changes and corrupted my work.
Never again.
microsoft: hey lets set up onedrive and make it your new documents folder for everything on your computer
also microsoft: oh yeah you only get 15gb unless you pay more but we won’t tell you that and once full you can’t use your documents folder
I remember having a 90$ Android phone that was also loaded with bloatware.
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
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.
