Yes. Later today, I’ll summon all my grit and disable OneDrive, restore from backup, and redo what I’ve done since that backup
One drive sucks sweaty donkey balls.
I’m required to use it for school so my lecturer can access my files, but it never syncs properly and is continually asking me to login again or wants to save somewhere strange.
Color me mystified. I’ve used it for over a decade with negligble problems on a dozen-ish machines over that time interval.
Everything in My Documents, My Pictures, etc., is synced. So keep all your documents, pix, etc. somewhere in those folder trees. All apps (MS & otherwise) should be configured to default to storing their results somewhere in there.
Everything can be marked “Keep a local copy”, and then everything is always on this machine, and the cloud, and any other machines you may have.
It is NOT a backup solution in the sense that it can let you recover inadvertently deleted or modified files.
It is totally a up-to-the-minute backup solution in the sense that if your device bricks itself, is stolen, or falls overboard from a ship, you just need to go buy another device, log into it as you, wait a couple hours, and all your files are back where they belong on your shiny new hardware.
In the modern world of portable devices dragged all over hell & gone, the latter form of backup is IMO about 100x more valuable that the former sort.
With some help, I think I’ve got things working right. Thank you for all your sympathy and help
This is how I use it also and it works fine. I can’t remember the last time I even got nagged by it for any reason, and I’ve never had a major problem with it.
Not to say that everyone will have the same experience with it, but to imply that it’s a buggy mess in general is not accurate.
I absolutely fucking bristle when I see the incredibly stupid euphemism “in the cloud”. Listen, “clouds” are the things that float around up in the sky. They’re fucking useless as a paradigm.
In the internet context, “the cloud” is a marketing euphemism for “a buncha internet servers”, with the implication that “they will never fail”.
But they do fail. Constantly. For one reason or another, even it it’s the user’s own fault. And, conveniently, they offer the opportunity for the “cloud” to examine your confidential data. And maybe drain your bank accounts if someone hacks them.
My recommendation to my friend who runs a very lucrative home business is regular local backups with periodic offsite storage. Old-school stuff. Has been used by banks for more than half a century. It works, and it’s trivially simple, and it’s robustly reliable,
I kind of like the turn of phrase, to be honest.
Not because I have faith in “the cloud” but because a real cloud is ephemeral - either it is heated and dispersed, or it becomes a thunderstorm.
Both of which analogies work for both the cloud services I have worked with (GCP and AWS)
As a former IT director for relatively large regional bank, I disagree with this statement. Yes, when I started in the early 90s, that’s what we used. Tape backups, rotated offsite on a regular basis.
But by the time I retired in 2016, this method had long since been replaced by a ‘continual’ backup system, with several versions of all files replicated offsite at our own secured recovery facility. And now this has been replaced with cloud storage.
And that was just our local data and files. The ‘core’ system, which contained all the customer financial information, was outsourced to a 3rd party which was headquartered several states away. And they replicated their data in several facilities around the world.
ETA: partly Ninja-ed by @Railer13.
The “cloud” is a vast array of very powerful machines each running dozens to hundreds virtual servers which are maintained by pros and are massively massively redundant. There is no one server in a rack in a building that holds your particular account’s data. It’s well spread out and well protected. Short of nuclear war, nothing is going to take down Google’s or MS’s “cloud” infrastructure. Nothing.
One hell of a lot of the financial industry, including banks, is now doing a large fraction of all their data processing in clouds. It’s the smart redundant reliable way to do large scale computing.
IMO the esteemed @wolfpup is spewing 1990s gospel here in 2025. The big iron Fortune 500 world has not worked his way for 10-15 years now.
It is silly for a small biz or a home computer user to think they can make their own computers or backup solutions nearly as secure from attack / theft as are the ones which make up the “cloud”.
The whole concept of bugs is that they don’t always hit everyone. Maybe you use it slightly differently than @Andy_L does, and it’s something he does (that should work), that it’s never occurred to you to do, that’s causing the bug. Or maybe there’s some obscure setting somewhere in his OS that’s different from yours, that doesn’t cause problems except when trying to use OneDrive. Or some piece of his hardware is a slightly different version than yours, or any odd thing.
A piece of software that’s a buggy mess for some people and works fine for others is a buggy mess in general, because that’s how bugs work.
For reputable tech companies who know what they’re doing, that’s probably true. Google or Amazon’s cloud services are almost certainly more robust than anything you could homebrew. But we’re not talking about reputable tech companies who know what they’re doing, here. We’re talking about Microsoft. I mean, maybe they got it right this time, but they’ve made enough howlingly bad blunders in the past that my confidence in that possibility is extremely low.
No, not true. There is software that has flaws and doesn’t work properly for anyone. I speak from far too much experience.
Bugs don’t always work the way you’re implying. Some bugs can be reproduced consistently. Some bugs happen by doing something that everyone who uses it will do. A couple of examples would be when Windows 98 Second Edition was new, and would freeze on shutdown every single time, forcing you to manually shut off your computer (until it was eventually patched). Another would be a video game that freezes at the same spot when you do a needed story quest.
Hell, I worked for a software company that released a new version of a database project that was broken for everyone who installed it. And I was tech support and was instructed not to tell customers that it was just broken, period. I had to go through the motions and pretend to troubleshoot the issue before logging a ticket for a later followup (after our developers finally found a fix).
Those kinds of bugs should never make it to release because you’d think Q&A would find them but they do happen.
Some in this thread said that the software just sucked and was always glitching, and that was the nature of it. And it’s worth pointing out that it’s not the case.
So… I’ve had both a seamless and a glitchy experience with OneDrive. And i honestly think the difference was mostly Internet connectivity. But maybe it was also that the seamless experience was set up by corporate IT, and the glitchy one was set up by some combination of me and Microsoft.
My corporate laptop stored most everything on one drive and it worked. And if you needed a new laptop, you signed in and waited a while and everything was just the way you’d left it on the old laptop.
My home laptop hid files, and sometimes they turned out to only be available online, and…
Really, my experiences were night and day.
I do trust “cloud” backups, though. Sure, i keep a local backup of valuable stuff, because it’s much faster to get at. But i also keep a cloud backup.
I’ve had a really good experience at home with my own setup.
My agency is implementing it for everyone later this year, for thousands of people in our enterprise.
I expect problems. So, the opposite of your experience.
Heh, I’ve run into problems where the answer was “a bunch of our Amazon EC2 instances went offline”. Nobody’s perfect, and even the “cloud” is just a bunch of individual computers, in the end. It’s safety in numbers, at best. I’ve run “cloud” services myself. No matter how you architect it, it’s always possible to have a nasty interruption.
Yeah well…one drive just ate my edits.
A file was set to autosave, with the onedrive being my school account,
I edited and closed, then came back 2 hours later and there are no edits.
One drive is a damn fucking donkey ball sucking screwup.
Who knows how many other files I had set to autosave that are now half done,
What a fucking nightmare.
I’ve used OneDrive at work for the past 10 years, and when I transferred to the Design dept. and was issued a Mac laptop, I was still able to access OneDrive. I occasionally get work requests that aren’t Design related, and OneDrive is handy to share with all the PC users at my workplace.
You have to shift your concept of technology and stop assuming things will always be done the same way. Find tutorials online on how to use OneDrive so you don’t struggle so much with it. It may be a lot to take in, but when you keep using it, it becomes second nature. You also have to shed the notion that MS has been unreliable in the past and nothing ever changes. It HAS improved. I used to curse MS apps as much as anybody, but they actually LISTENED to complaints and made things better.
Design uses Dropbox to store our work projects, since we frequently have to grab each other’s files for updates, revisions, etc., and Mac’s Finder operates just like a local hard drive window. Having all my work files in DB saves me a ton of hard drive space. I just have to remember to switch online/offline status on the files so they don’t overrun my own hard drive.
It is, actually. Windows 10 and 11, at least the non-corporate versions, have multiple, endless reminders about how important it is to activate Windows Backup. The nags will pop up after most Windows Updates but also at various random times. Sometimes they’re formulated as “let’s finish setting up backup for you” or “this PC is not fully configured, here are the next steps” and then you have to find the link in a corner that says “not now”. Sometimes it’s a nag on the login screen, before you type in your password or PIN. Sometimes it’s a notification in the Start Menu.
The wording is misleading, talking about Backup when it’s actually OneDrive. The ultimate goal is to move all your important files to OneDrive and then, when you run out or room (because the default OneDrive has only a few gigabytes of capacity), start charging you to store your own data.
And since most people log onto Windows using a cloud account, once they accept, there’s no need for Microsoft to ask for credentials. They just connect to your default OneDrive and get busy backing up (backuppping?).
It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t broken. To make OneDrive work, your files are moved to the OneDrive folder. For some programs like older versions of Outlook (from Microsoft!), that move just breaks everything.
And then, in many cases, some of the content gets removed from the local disk and turned into web links, some of which are broken. It’s been a problem for almost a year, and now Microsoft is doing a Trump and claiming it was meant to behave like this all along.
ETA: At work, we use a corporate version of OneDrive and SharePoint and Teams and Office 365 (now called Copilot 365 I think) continuously since 2020, and it works wonderfully well. We have very little paper, very few physical servers with documents, it’s all in the cloud. Our laptops automatically move things back and forth from the hard disk to the cloud to prevent the disk from getting full (Windows “Storage Sense”). So I know it can work very well when it wants to. But the non-corporate OneDrive / Backup is a hot mess, and a trap.
There is OneDrive Business and OneDrive Personal; just like Teams and Teams Personal; formerly Skype and Skype Business; and Windows Home, Pro, and Enterprise. I have no idea when the distinctions are purely marketing, and when they are different products.
The OneDrives may still be different, or previously have had differences, in that rclone (a tool to copy to and from cloud storage services) has supported one, but not the other, and later supported both, but as two separate options. Similar to how you would expect Google Drive and Dropbox to be different options.
So the experience that one works well and the other poorly is not surprising at all. In a way it’s like saying that Excel works for you but, Word is giving you problems. Related, but not identical, software.
Yes, and i was truly delighted when they told me they would have to delete everything on OneDrive because i had too much data. Indeed, that’s why i bought a large hard drive. And now my windows laptop mostly works fine again.