As a Linux person forced to use OneDrive at work, OneDrive sucks in almost every capacity. Why would I pay MS for a service that fails at its core objectives?
News media literally will not use it. Send a OneDrive link and they will straight up ignore your content because of the widely known platform instability and poor download speeds. Time is money.
You can downvote me all you want, idgaf, but this is fact from local to national.
It moves your library locations when you install it, so virtually everything that uses a Users\{Username}\{file path} instead of the library’s referenced location will break. Oblivion Remastered players recently encountered this, because the game defaults to saving in a hard path instead of a referenced path. If you have OneDrive installed, the Documents folder exists at Users\{Username}\OneDrive\Documents. But the game defaults to saving in Users\{Username}\Documents. But Steam uses the referenced library location. So when Steam tries to back up your saves to the cloud, it finds an empty saves folder.
Second, it defaults to backing up your desktop. Likely because many users just default to saving everything to their desktop. Which means you end up with a bunch of broken/duplicate shortcuts on each subsequent machine you use, because they all get cloud-imported from other computers.
I recently switched to Google drive but it wants to use extra storage in order to back up my photos as photos, when I have all my files I need backing up in one folder, including my photos. The photo search in onedrive is horrible so I switched to Google.
First, OneDrive only moves libraries if you enable backup for that library, something that the user is prompted to approve during OOBE or when setting up OneDrive.
Thing is, library locations are an environment variable. This isn’t a OneDrive issue, using an absolute path is bad software development.
The issue you describe is not unique to OneDrive, it also affected users who had remapped their libraries to a secondary drive or literally anywhere other than C:\Users\Username
Ironically, the original Oblivion release respects the environment variable path. The same is true for virtually every other piece of software, which is why so many users were confused encountering this for the first time.
Most Shortcuts default to C:\Users\Public\Desktop which is not indexed by OneDrive, but user created shortcuts or those for apps that install to the user account’s AppData folder (Discord, Zoom) will end up on the regular desktop.
For those who do want to back up their desktop but don’t want machine specific shortcuts showing up ‘dead’ on other machines, you can created a shortcuts to the Public Desktop that the user can drop their other shortcuts into.
Most Shortcuts default to C:\Users\Public\Desktop which is not indexed by OneDrive, but user created shortcuts or those for apps that install to the user account’s AppData folder (Discord, Zoom) will end up on the regular desktop. For those who do want to back up their desktop but don’t want machine specific shortcuts showing up ‘dead’ on other machines, you can created a shortcuts to the Public Desktop that the user can drop their other shortcuts into.
Now explain this to 80yo grandma who uses her PC just to browse facebook, download cute images and post them
In order to be exposed to this phenomenon, this 80 year old grandma would need to have two PCs for that purpose, which is rather uncommon. They’d also need to engage in more activities than you’re describing, because browser only Grandma probably doesn’t have any shortcuts.
I own a repair shop and interact with your average consumer / home user on a regular basis, so making these concepts understandable to them is not alien to me.
As an alternative, though, I have had to explain why leaving OneDrive running and paying Microsoft $2 per month would have saved them a few hundred dollars in advanced data recovery fees or maybe even have any data at all after a crashed head made confetti out of the platter.
I’ve also sent people to check OneDrive.com and have them skip that entire phase of work altogether. Compared to 10 years ago, data recovery cases are increasingly rare in my shop.
It might seem dead simple to you and I, but getting this type of user to manage a 3-2-1 backup themselves is hard work and is no likely to pan out in their favor.
Sometimes it randomly stops synchronizing without telling me, and I need to physically move between machines and locations to get everything back online again. Network issues can happen to any vendor, but why is there no notification for days at a time about it?
Somewhat related, it happens that overdrive fails to read timestamps and deletes my work because another computer without it comes online. That’s fairly unacceptable from a synchronization tool that demands to replace my hard drive.
Not being a Microsoft product, not giving people something to complain about.
I have to use OneDrive everyday and use it to sync my work files and project files in SharePoint, and I’m regularly working on files with other people, generate reports to a synced folder, and retrieve files from others/external users and don’t half half the complaints as a lot on here (but that is my main complaint lol).
Literally the only issue I have with it is with external sharing. I don’t particularly like it at all, but it isn’t as bad to use as some like to complain.
My company switched over to it to use with sharepoint for our quality system instead of synology because all files need to be tracked and we were already integrated with Microsoft every other way. That was two months ago.
Since then, multiple people have come forward with problems about syncing documents.
I, myself had multiple times already in this short time where I would make changes to a file, save it, one drive would sync and tell me the changes were pushed, colleagues got the previous version while their one drives told them everything was synced, and then I had to open my version again from the Onedrive folder to see that it was the new version, manually save it again, and then manually pause and resume syncing, then FINALLY it would push the changes.
It isn’t common, but when you have hundreds of thousands of files and there is a 0.1% chance that it silently fails syncing some files with absolutely no indication, even in the admin logs, that happens many many times
As a Linux person forced to use OneDrive at work, OneDrive sucks in almost every capacity. Why would I pay MS for a service that fails at its core objectives?
Name two capacities that it fails in
To be honest, that sounds like an internet issue.
Touché
News media literally will not use it. Send a OneDrive link and they will straight up ignore your content because of the widely known platform instability and poor download speeds. Time is money.
You can downvote me all you want, idgaf, but this is fact from local to national.
Doesn’t news media kinda ignore everything anyway?
Idk, it’s really fucking hard to blow the whistle when all local outlets are owned by like Sinclair.
No they do not ignore everything. Especially when you have working relationships and mutual benefit.
I don’t like OneDrive but that’s not correct. I work in broadcast news and we absolutely use OneDrive for internal and external file sharing.
It moves your library locations when you install it, so virtually everything that uses a Users\{Username}\{file path} instead of the library’s referenced location will break. Oblivion Remastered players recently encountered this, because the game defaults to saving in a hard path instead of a referenced path. If you have OneDrive installed, the Documents folder exists at Users\{Username}\OneDrive\Documents. But the game defaults to saving in Users\{Username}\Documents. But Steam uses the referenced library location. So when Steam tries to back up your saves to the cloud, it finds an empty saves folder.
Second, it defaults to backing up your desktop. Likely because many users just default to saving everything to their desktop. Which means you end up with a bunch of broken/duplicate shortcuts on each subsequent machine you use, because they all get cloud-imported from other computers.
Oh. That’s dirty pool.
The moving of libraries is what really irks me. I refuse to install it. Fucking pissed me off when lots of shit broke. Had to use junctions to fix it.
ALSO. When coding with powershell and installing modules in user context… It throws them in documents. Which gets usurped my OneDrive.
So now my powershell modules freak out due to being locked/syncing.
WHY MICROSOFT??
I recently switched to Google drive but it wants to use extra storage in order to back up my photos as photos, when I have all my files I need backing up in one folder, including my photos. The photo search in onedrive is horrible so I switched to Google.
First, OneDrive only moves libraries if you enable backup for that library, something that the user is prompted to approve during OOBE or when setting up OneDrive.
Thing is, library locations are an environment variable. This isn’t a OneDrive issue, using an absolute path is bad software development. The issue you describe is not unique to OneDrive, it also affected users who had remapped their libraries to a secondary drive or literally anywhere other than C:\Users\Username Ironically, the original Oblivion release respects the environment variable path. The same is true for virtually every other piece of software, which is why so many users were confused encountering this for the first time.
Most Shortcuts default to C:\Users\Public\Desktop which is not indexed by OneDrive, but user created shortcuts or those for apps that install to the user account’s AppData folder (Discord, Zoom) will end up on the regular desktop. For those who do want to back up their desktop but don’t want machine specific shortcuts showing up ‘dead’ on other machines, you can created a shortcuts to the Public Desktop that the user can drop their other shortcuts into.
Now explain this to 80yo grandma who uses her PC just to browse facebook, download cute images and post them
In order to be exposed to this phenomenon, this 80 year old grandma would need to have two PCs for that purpose, which is rather uncommon. They’d also need to engage in more activities than you’re describing, because browser only Grandma probably doesn’t have any shortcuts.
I own a repair shop and interact with your average consumer / home user on a regular basis, so making these concepts understandable to them is not alien to me.
As an alternative, though, I have had to explain why leaving OneDrive running and paying Microsoft $2 per month would have saved them a few hundred dollars in advanced data recovery fees or maybe even have any data at all after a crashed head made confetti out of the platter.
I’ve also sent people to check OneDrive.com and have them skip that entire phase of work altogether. Compared to 10 years ago, data recovery cases are increasingly rare in my shop.
It might seem dead simple to you and I, but getting this type of user to manage a 3-2-1 backup themselves is hard work and is no likely to pan out in their favor.
This is beyond most general windows users comprehension.
Sometimes it randomly stops synchronizing without telling me, and I need to physically move between machines and locations to get everything back online again. Network issues can happen to any vendor, but why is there no notification for days at a time about it?
Somewhat related, it happens that overdrive fails to read timestamps and deletes my work because another computer without it comes online. That’s fairly unacceptable from a synchronization tool that demands to replace my hard drive.
Not being a Microsoft product, not giving people something to complain about.
I have to use OneDrive everyday and use it to sync my work files and project files in SharePoint, and I’m regularly working on files with other people, generate reports to a synced folder, and retrieve files from others/external users and don’t half half the complaints as a lot on here (but that is my main complaint lol).
Literally the only issue I have with it is with external sharing. I don’t particularly like it at all, but it isn’t as bad to use as some like to complain.
My company switched over to it to use with sharepoint for our quality system instead of synology because all files need to be tracked and we were already integrated with Microsoft every other way. That was two months ago.
Since then, multiple people have come forward with problems about syncing documents.
I, myself had multiple times already in this short time where I would make changes to a file, save it, one drive would sync and tell me the changes were pushed, colleagues got the previous version while their one drives told them everything was synced, and then I had to open my version again from the Onedrive folder to see that it was the new version, manually save it again, and then manually pause and resume syncing, then FINALLY it would push the changes.
It isn’t common, but when you have hundreds of thousands of files and there is a 0.1% chance that it silently fails syncing some files with absolutely no indication, even in the admin logs, that happens many many times