All Your Files Are Belong to Us

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I use Parallels Desktop to maintain several virtual machines (different operating system platforms, different versions of the same one, etc). I went to update Windows 10 (long overdue windows updates) and on reboot instead of the normal Desktop I get:

ALL YOUR FILES ARE EXACTLY WHERE YOU LEFT THEM

… which sits there on my screen for a long long long time while I wonder what ^$@#!@ virus infected me and try to remember when I last made a backup of the virtual machine and I’m feeling really glad this isn’t my native OS environment doing this…

Turns out it’s Microsoft’s idea of normal behavior subsequent to a set of Windows updates – WTF??

2

It only appeared for a short while, maybe 30 seconds, during the Win10 updates I did, and while I find it a little corporate-bland, the attempt by MS to be friendly and communicative about what was going on was far better than anything I’ve seen before. I’d rather read the above than something like “This authorized update will replicate your existing file and disc structure.”

3

Does anybody care where files are anymore? On my own computer (Windows 10), if I bring up File Explorer and go to C:/users/me/documents I can’t open anything. But if I go to This PC/Documents I can open anything, and it must just be a link to the same directory because it has all the same files. When I connect my phone to my computer to download photos, I don’t know where in the filesystem I’ll find them, and I’ve only ever used one camera app on that phone.

Honestly, I think software makers would rather we didn’t concern ourselves with stuff like files anymore.

4

Yes, both MS and Apple have been trying to get us to accept the “transparent desktop” sort of model for a long time. While worry about “files” as a computer thing might be outdated, the more general sense of a document being a ‘file’ is not. Only the most basic users keep all their files/docs/work data in one or two generic places, so yeah, I’d say that “where your files are” is still relevant and “all your files are right where you left them” is a comforting notice during an OS upgrade.

5

It’s not particularly reassuring that my files are where I left them when I didn’t have any choice where to put them in the first place.

6

I assume you have at least one hard drive on which you could make your own data folder tree. If not, what OS are you using?

7

One of the reasons I"m a luddite holdout on the smartphone front is that I don’t have access to the contents of the phone OS at the file level. I put my files where I want them, I put my applications where I want them and I don’t want an OS that thinks it knows better than I do how things should behave. Don’t even let met get started on “updates”.