OneDrive deleted my files!
Literally. I open up my terminal and try to cd Desktop only to be told that no such file exists. I thought for sure everyone this was happening to was just not reading something correctly and were foolish. Nope! It literally began deleting my files.
Edit 2: Even once it's done and you have them locally and not "on demand", the Desktop is in
~/OneDrive/Desktopinstead of~/Desktop. See this helpful comment.
It looks like there might be a way to sort of disable Files on Demand but it looks like it won't let me do it until it's done uploading? I'll post updates.
Not to be dramatic, but I'm really going through it. My mouse logitech mouse is suddenly chattering really bad and double clicking everything. Also while Steam refuses to let me disable auto updates for all games in any sort of easy way. And DDG seems intent on only showing me results related to launching games without updating (as opposed to merely disabling auto updates until I launch). The chatter fixer I found for my mouse does not work and the other requires some logitech program to even try to use. (The repo doesn't mention the name.) This is awful. When it rains it pours, I guess. Literally can't even high light this text to wrap it in a spoiler. This is fucking stupid.
Context: My parents have a family plan for Microsoft 365 they added me too and it has 1 TB of storage I can use. I wouldn't have turned it on otherwise.
Edit: My desktop background has literally vanished and turned solid black.
OneDrive is literally built on fucked tech from the get go and Microsoft initially even pointed out in its online documentation that it is NOT a backup solution, but just a way to enable cloud sharing of documents to access them from anywhere. Their higher-ups decided to make it into something it was never originally intended to be, which is why it is constantly a disaster with people losing documents due to sync problems.
Sorry for the rant, I just fucking hate OneDrive with a deep passion due to the higher leadership at my work forcing us to shutdown our local file shares and making our entire org migrate all our data to SharePoint Online. It has been a miserable transition and I'm in charge of migrating over 100TB and tens of millions of files from over 30 departments. Let me just say SPO is NOT a fileshare solution, and despite me pointing this out countless times it has fallen on deaf ears. Everyone hates it and its limitations are insane (e.g. no more than 100,000 files per document library, 400 character limit for file paths including the base URL, etc). And on top of that all, we have warned customers countless times NOT to sync their OneDrives to any document library or they WILL have problems. Do they listen? Of fucking course they don't. We've had endless tickets and the migration isn't even complete yet.
Tldr; fuck OneDrive and fuck SharePoint Online.
/Endrant
fuck OneDrive and SharePoint online forever. That migration sounds fucking terrible lol, we just got done doing something similar although much lower scale. The character limit for sure was a huge headache, so is the 100,000 file limit.
I feel your pain man. Our university of 40k people did the same thing “from on high” and we ran into the same problems in our lab. We only had 4 million files to move into a Teams share. Which, btw, takes about 5 weeks to “sync” to OneDrive, which is how we were expected to replace our workflow instead of a shared network storage drive our lab owned
q_q
Jeez how long did it take to upload that 100tb? I've had files 50gb in size that have taken hours because of their 30-100mbps upload speed.
We started the project about 4 months ago now and have been doing it in chunks. It's a lot more complicated than it seems at face value (migrating/recreating ACLs, removing stale content ahead of time, discovering some applications will not work with data on SPO such as CAD type apps, etc etc). I anticipate we'll be complete in about another month at most.
you're not alone. Ours did that about 3 years ago. Still fucked.
and now they're gladly moving more and more business critical data into things like ms dynamics, or ms reporting databases into fabric.
We cant even acess half of our own workflow data because of not having enough the right dynamics licenses.
Yes a fucking shared excel file with a task log linking to local network folders was better. It was our fucking data , our data model and our fucking filing system. and all the staff knew how too use it. so much more time was spent actually doing work. we ever used to haveto trawl through version histories looking for the magic file version that would not flip to 0kb as soon as you open it. And we used to have fucking locale timestamps, not random bullshit cloud-o'clock, and dumbfuck US mm/dd/yyyy sorted in literal order bullshit.
fuck ms, and fuck my employer for keeping on paying them.
Also, don't use Windows.
Source
Was a computer repair tech until a few months ago. About 6 months ago this older guy brought in his laptop because he had been hacked and they had changed his password. Was able to change the password to something new using some fancy tools but upon getting in all his files were still missing. Turns out OneDrive was on and ALL of his important files were only on OneDrive and not the computer. Well, Microsoft had changed his password when the hackers changed his computer password so he was locked out and Microsoft didn't believe he owned the account anymore since he didn't know the password. After weeks of calls he just gave up trying to get his stuff back.
Fuck OneDrive.
I'm confused. Wouldn't he have access to his email and maybe phone number that is attached to his Microsoft account to prove who he is?
I get the hate, but what is Microsoft to do in those situations? They have two users claiming to own the account, each with assumably the same level of proof (virtually none) and no backup recovery set. So what, they just believe the first person to call in and say “I was hacked can I have a new password”?
Unless something that links to the owner in a verifiable way exists on the account, which isn’t available to someone logged in (credit card number used for purchase for instance), I don’t really see a way around this.
The same thing happens with game accounts all the time. Two people with the same level of proof claim they own an account? Unfortunately the account gets marked as irreversibly compromised and permanently banned.
If Microsoft is unable to verify ownership of the account, they shouldn't take ownership of your files.
Its more that they created an unfixable situation, not that they can't solve it
Its pretty shitty to ask for forgiveness not permission just to advertise onedrive
I don’t know that I’d consider this their fault. The user handed their info over to someone else. Yeah, it sucks that the end result is losing their files, but you can’t really hold a company responsible for their users doing dumb things.
The issue here is that OneDrive does not make it clear at all that your local files are going away when you enable OneDrive. On Demand is now on by default for everyone. Unless you know this is a thing that happens (or happen to catch weirdness like I did where the Desktop folder seemed to vanish because it was moved) there is no indication this is happening. That's why this is Microsoft's fault.
Yeah, that doesn’t really apply to the story I was replying to. The complaint was about Microsoft not believing the user owned the account.
It’s tangentially related to the overall topic, and that could indeed be the root cause, but “they didn’t give him access because he didn’t know the new password” is security 101.
Fair enough, "the user handed their info over to someone" sounded like you meant their files to OneDrive.
The root of the problem is that Microsoft deleted his files off of his hard drive, without his understanding/consent. Had they not done that, there would have been no problem.
No? The “root of the problem” is that the cloud service the files were stored in, was deauthed. At that point, I would absolutely expect all files to be deleted.
You can argue that M$ shouldn’t have pushed for that by default, but the problem as described is “user stored their important files in one drive, they gave away their password, password was changed, new password was unknown, one drive removed all local copies of files stored in it, microsoft couldn’t verify who they were when they called.”
Had this been the other way around, where the scammer got file access and the original user reset their password, you’d expect the scammer to have the local copies deleted… would you not?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I'd expect the scammer to already have any files backed up, immune to deletion.
Potentially but would you not expect one drive to at least remove the ones that it has access to?
They tool his files then told him he wanted that, then removed access.
Modern day cooperation's are worse than 90's scammers
I’m honestly not even certain what you’re trying to say in that first sentence.
Well I can fix the spelling mistake but I can't fix stupid, so you're on your own pal
Why would Microsoft tell him what he wanted?
The spelling mistake isn’t the problem, it just makes no god damn sense.
There are almost always ways to verify the correct owner for something like this... None of which it sounds like Microsoft was willing to do, as they only seemed to care about what the current password is.
You are making an assumption that the person can't provide any way to identify himself as the owner. The story as written states they didn't care about anything other than the current password.
Almost always != always, and an individual falling for a scam where they hand off their password would typically fall into the category of “unable to prove ownership”.
Yeah, like almost always what? Almost always hitting dismiss on all of the phone number verification and 2fa prompts because they're "annoying"?
Insert surprised Pikachu face here
I am aware that on a Windows machine, turning on a OneDrive subscription (or at least an E5 license, is where I'm very specifically talking about), certain folders get moved from c:\users\[username] into c:\users\[username]\OneDrive. Then OneDrive syncs those locations up to 365.
If you just open cmd (not as admin), it will put you at c:\users\[username] and then if you just cd desktop ... yeah, that's empy now. dir in c:\users\[username] and I bet you'll find a OneDrive folder.
Of note, the default user folder paths that get changed are \Attachments \Desktop \Documents \Pictures. \Downloads stays at c:\users\[username]\downloads
Oh my god, you're right. Thank you! You just saved me a lot of stress. Because it finally finished and I selected to keep my files locally but the desktop was still "gone."
There are still some other weird things going on but they're minor. My desktop background is just solid black instead of the image I was using and none of the icons on my desktop have the little arrow thing saying they're shortcuts.
Background is probably black because it's still pointed at the old, non-onedrive, path that no longer leads anywhere.
Windows: I will move this folder because I feel like it
Also Windows: Oh no bro! Where's the file I was pointing at???
Windows: "All your files are exactly where you left them."
I have altered the file path. Pray I don't alter it further.
Your files are now my files. Pray I continue to let you access them.
Desktop background (or other theme stuff) - easiest way is to just reset that to what you want.
The arrow overlay on .lnk files, you could check regedit HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer for a "Shell Icons" key ("subfolder"), which should only be there if it was added manually, but I'd be interested in what it was if it was there.
You could also try rebuilding the icon cache.
I have to think that both of these have something to do with the system looking in the "old" place for the desktop background image and the icon cache, and not finding them there.
Big thanks to Microsoft for their efforts to advertise Linux.
There was this mini golden era around 2019 or so where it really seemed like Windows was getting their shit together. I think a lot of places use Macs for development now and Windows was trying to get that market share back. Stuff like the new console and WSL were amazing.
Yeah I swear from when Nadella took over until like 2 years ago, Microsoft really seemed to be on the right route. They were becoming the "good guys" of big tech companies.
WSL, actually being really good stewards of GitHub, Chredge actually (at first) being way better for users than Chrome, the amazing revitalisation of some of their oldest and most loved game franchises like Age of Empires and Flight Simulator.
But then recently we've had Microsoft adding shitty AI to everything, from Edge to Windows. We've had that AoE revitalisation tarnshined by showing off a really shitty official mobile game with all the makings of a typical pay 2 win time sink. The Age of Mythology remake has obvious AI art featured in it despite them insisting no AI was used (though thankfully the actual gameplay is as good as hoped for, at least). We've got large layoffs and other shitty corporate bullshit towards workers.
It was earlier, when they released Windows 7 and it was the first (and only) release, management gave development a largely free hand and they could bring down some technical debt.
But apparently that didn't work out for Microsoft and now we get one dystopian news after another.
WSL sounds really cool, but I was already gone by then. How well does it work/compare to bash?
It works well - for a Windows subsystem. It is well-integrated but also separate which can be annoying sometimes.
For example, you might code in Python in VSC against a WSL folder but make a script to eventually run in Windows. You need to install and update Python twice then - a Linux and a Windows version (obvious, but can be annoying).
WSL is also really slow, especially for filesystem heavy stuff. You know how on Linux programs sometimes run faster via Wine/Proton than on Windows itself? Yeah, this is the other way around.
It isn't bash, it's Linux that's well-embedded with the rest of Windows. You can get most Linux stuff working reasonably well, and you can even get a working GUI of some distros.
Just saying 'bash' was ineloquent of me; could I easily open a terminal that feels like a Linux/UNIX shell?
Though from your comment, I expect the answer is "Yes."
Yes, even Cygwin and Git for Windows feel like a Linux shell despite being less like Linux than WSL.
Honestly the type of stuff I do works good enough with MSYS through Git for Windows (which is a basic bash environment). There are three ways to get bash on windows,
I preferred the simplicity of Git for Windows and Cygwin. Now, if I still had Windows on a work computer I probably would've deep dove into WSL and figured it out more.
Most useful things i found in wsl that made it not feel like a vm is knowing the wslpath command, and the fact that it can execute any exe such as explorer.exe (which works for even wsl directories). those two things let you use sed/grep/awk on files in windows and execute any exe on stuff in linux.
We tried to onboard two devs into our project earlier this year with it and it was not good.
We spent 4 days trying to get it to work, and had all kinds of problems from VPN not working, DNS not working and compile times being 20x slower (as I later learned, you're not supposed to use your Windows NTFS partition inside of it). Partially, this has to do with our corporate environment being annoying, but it simply being different from a normal Linux in this regard is still annoying.
On the fifth day, we set up a Linux VM with them and they were ready to work in an hour.
Once I get some extra money to fuck around with my computers, everything is becoming foss. Fuck Microsoft.
Just an FYI, Windows likely just moved your files from users\[username] to users\[username]\OneDrive instead. When OneDrive sets itself up, it basically grabs all of the relevant folders and moves them into a single “OneDrive” folder. Not a huge issue if you’re setting up the PC for the first time. But if you’ve been using the PC for a while, it’ll break everything because now all of your local files have moved and none of your systems are pointing at the right location anymore. For instance, your desktop is likely black because your image file got moved into that OneDrive folder.
I'm so glad I purged windows from my systems this year.
Go fuck yourself Microsoft.
Hell yeah bro same. I've been amazed at how much better Linux is in just about every way, except for native software availability, but it'll get there. I feel like Microsoft is approaching the tipping point for shit people will put up with, and desktop Linux is so good now that non-technical people can move over to it.
It has great native software availability. It's just not the same software.
I already planned on my next computer being Linux Mint, but it's getting more and more desired as time goes on.
I was playing Elden Ring when it began stuttering, turns out Windows Defender was just constantly reading the disk (I still have a hard drive). Finally turned off maximum priority (seemingly random) scans in task scheduler when I began stuttering again. This time it was Windows Compatibility Telemetry taking up 50% of the disk, until I finally found a way to turn that off.
It'd be so nice to have an OS that doesn't run random unnecessary things without your permission.
No time like the present!
I shifted all my important data to an external disk, wiped the main ssd, slapped Debian on there, then moved the data back. Great way to spend an afternoon.
I likely would but my computer's from 2016 with no upgrades, so I'm on the cusp of building a new one from scratch.
After I do that though the old one's becoming a linux server for sure.
Edit: Hmm, everyone telling me about their massive performance boosts is making me consider pulling the trigger and migrating my current computer.
TBF you'd probably get even more benefit from de-bloating that PC then. Free up some processing power for the tasks you actually want, instead of doing Microsofts bidding in the background all the time.
But we've all got different plans/priorities/timelines. Best of luck to you m8!
I just put mint on a 2015 dell shit laptop that barley functioned with windows. Now it's a perfectly fine computer. I don't do much besides use the internet but it struggled with that before.
I'm daily driving a 2013 laptop on Endeavour and it feels as fast as new stuff. Doing a lot of relatively heavy compute on it too.
Slap some XFCE or LxQt in there, she'll run twice as quick
That's still newer than any of my daily-use laptops that are all running full-featured Linux distros just fine. I got 'em all cheap secondhand, and just pumped up the RAM (12-16GB) and installed SSDs.
hmmn, HDD? you really need to replace that for your main drive if you can - whatever the os .
I have an SSD for my OS, but a large HDD for my games. It really starts to show as textures take a long time to load in.
As a gamer, I was anxious about switching to Linux as my daily driver, but I needed to fully immerse myself to improve at Linux, and I've been pleasantly surprised by how few gaming related problems I've had.
For your mouse double click issue, I have a g600 and ran into the same thing. It's due to a teeny tiny copper plate in the switch degrading over time. I'm not confident in my soldering skills to swap out the whole switches, but I was able to buy some new switches for like $5, pop open the little plastic switch box, carefully pull out the little copper plate with tweezers, pop open the switch on my mouse, and carefully replace the little copper plate with the new one. Worked like a charm.
Are you me? I had the same Logitech mouse click issue and fixed it the same way; ordered extra switches online, opened them, and swapped only the copper plate. Mouse click works like a charm, as you said.
I had the same issue a few years ago. After spending forever looking for a solution online, I found a fantastic video that explained the reason for this degradation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5BhECVlKJA
TLDW, it has to do with some components (the contact plates) being rated for electronics of the 90s, with higher voltage than today's devices use. So these components are now subject to below optimal voltages (say, 1.8V or 3.3V), and tiny sparks happen that would not be there at 5V, thus damaging the plate ever so slightly.
Immediately after watching that video, I opened my mouse and scratched the plates with a flat screwdriver. I haven't had a problem since then (it's been a couple of years). But if it happens again I know exactly what to do to save my beloved G302.
Also, fuck OneDrive.
Do you perchance know if a similar manoeuver can be attempted to fix a mouse wheel click issue?
I think that would be more difficult because that is a different much smaller switch if I remember correctly.
Clearly user error
::: spoiler Reason For using onedrive :::
Fair enough lol. The only reason I even tried to is because my parents are apparently shelling out for a plan where all of us get 1 TB to ourselves.
If I remember right for steam, you can't disable updates for all games, but you can set some restrictive rules for when it can update. Stuff like it can only download updates for 1 minute monday morning at 3am.
Ooooh, this might be a great workaround. If I launch a game does it override this to download the update immediately?
If you launch a game through Steam and there's an update available for it, then Steam will force the update before it will run the game. Some games can be run by navigating to its install directory and running the executable directly, that should bypass any updates but will not work for all games.
Some games also have beta channels that are just the past versions of the game. Weather this exists or not is completely up to the game publisher though. I mostly see it in games that have active mod communities, so they want to let you lock down your version so your mod pack doesn't break suddenly.
You can also use offline mode.
Too fiddly. I don't want to constantly enable and disable it. Thank you though.
I'm not sure to be honest.
Never use onedrive
Yeah, gotta have several.
Raid gang
wth are you windows people doing? isn't this just supposed to be some cloud storage?
It’s roaming profiles plus folder redirection plus offline files.
Among the three it’s guaranteed to be 100% fucked.
This might be more of a norm that I realized. It seems like Mac does this too with iCloud but hides it better.
cd ~/Desktopon Mac doesn't give a big error despite it actually being stored somewhere else. (Also it seems to have more sensible "on demand" settings, or at least explains them better.) I was expecting something more like right click some folders or add them in a menu and they begin getting synced (similar to DropBox).been unable to login to our auth server today so basically free day at work, thanks crowdstrike
One drive does suck nards, but for your double clicking; logitech has been using shitass switches to detect clicks for a while now. They sooner rather than later fail to click once. Only solution I’ve found is to replace the switches (hard mode), or keep using the logitech mouse I have from 2009.
It’s sucks, but you just gotta go for another brand. Even razer doesn’t have such a rampant double click problem.
Logitech enshitified their dominant market position by cheaping on switches - works for them, they sell more mice (if you don’t put together they’re the source of the problem and it’s not a one-off issue).
MX518 gang
Mine is a G5, which looks like it lost the MX518’s sick ass faux metal and instead gets what I can best call “cracked lightning?”. I was too young to figure out mouse buying so the fam’s resident nerd chose that for me - I thank her to this day
I had a G5 for close to a decade and I miss that heavy little bugger. I've got a G502 right now and its rather good, but the max weight isn't as heavy as my old one.
I had to replace the cable on my G5 after it frayed after about a decade, but after that it was back to it. Sorry you lost yours, and I hope you never double click on the G502!
(All the weights gang, build that wrist strength)
Yep, that's what happened to mine. The jacket frayed until the wire got out and strangled itself. My 502 is still rocking strong after 5+ years, but here's hoping your g5 sticks around for a while, that was a great mouse.
every razr product I've owned has been e-waste quality. never buying from them again
That’s what I mean, even e-waste quality razer isn’t double clicking!!
I've never had a problem with my g502 hero, and it's about 4 years old
Mine clicked just after a year :( so it’s waiting to get switches soldered cause I ain’t buying a new one but don’t have the will to do it yet cause I got my ancient G5 still. (I live in America, so doing warranty shit is a hassle, and I surmised it would fail again so I should just fix it now)
That’s the reason why I switched to a steelseries mouse with optical switches. The mechanics look like they should last forever.
The switches do suck but they can usually be revived with contact cleaner. If you open the mouse you can spray around the switch plunger or better yet, pop off the top half of the switch case and spray the contact directly. That completely cleared up the double click on my G402 and even revived an old MX510 that was missing clicks.
I only know about OneDrive for business, but you might check the recycle bin in OneDrive online.
Edit also OneDrive changes the folder where your desktop is mapped to, so you might make sure you are CD'ing to the right location
I just want you to know that I tried to read this comment, got bored because it got technical, (user problem) and scrolled to the bottom to find the very helpful, important part, in giant letters and bolded. And I appreciate you.
In related news, I have had zero issues with my home network drive that is shared to the internet through FTP. Don't use OneDrive unless there's a really compelling reason to do so.
You most certainly are not, but for who it might concern: Never omit to protect this access with a VPN and/or even better ditch FTP and opt for secure protocols like SFTP.
Oh well yeah, I'm using SFTP. I didn't think that I needed to be explicit, but I see now that I did.
It happened to me once, disabled cloud backup on my documents folder, and onedrive decided if it can't have my folder, no one can
I did get my data back, since onedrive kept it in the rubbish bin or somewhere like that
After that i nuked onedrive from my laptop, and now i use arch btw
I love that last line haha
OneDrive is the devil. It symlinks the file structure on Windows and then moves all your photos and such into their chosen directory. If you uninstall it, it makes a half-hearted attempt to move them back, maybe, but will just do a random subset and give up.
After removal, you have to edit registry keys (obscure ones) to break Windows' connection to onedrive\pictures and such, or you end up with two pictures folders in your home dir.
So much more fail I can't even remember right now.
Another brick in the wall
Regarding your mouse double clicking, some Reddit users suggest pressing the click button quite hard a few times...
Oh wow. My one drive has been contained to it's own file area for ages now. I wish I could remember how I did that.
I did just recently tell Microsoft to kick rocks when they offered to back up my computer though, it wasn't that was it?
Me signing into active directory
cloud storage is not a backup. This should be engraved on all computers.
one drive is not even "storage" really - it's more of a embryonic car crash waiting for an unwitting pedestrian to step in front.
If for whatever reason any masochists are using onedrive, tthey really need to know about proper backup .
I thought OneDrive was a Windows thing. What's it doing on Linux?
Where did I say it was on Linux? For the record, they do have a Mac client so they might have a Linux one too.
I think it was assumed based on your use of command line and unix-like paths such as
~/Desktop, which do not work in Windows Command Prompt. (Powershell has aliases for unix commands likels, so unix paths do work there)It's just easier to type like that lol. That syntax works in Git for Windows.
i had the same thing a while back. i thought i disabled onedrive from running on my machine, went to delete some onedrive files because i was "running out of space", and deleted all the user files on my system
I use onedrive and I still hate this shit.
It took me two days to gut OneDrive out of my laptop when I bought it.
Did you delete my files bro?
Is is a G903 you using? It's a issue with cheap ass switches if that's the case. I RMAed one and the replacement did it even faster than the first. Gave up on that one.
I wanna say it's a G506 or something? It's that one that like everyone has because it was ~$80 and there was a deal years ago at Best Buy that included a $50 Steam gift card. I don't remember how long I've had it but it's certainly out of warranty.
It's sort of always had this problem but suddenly it got A LOT worse. It's around the same time as a Windows update. Makes me wonder if Windows was filtering out some of the clicks that were insanely close together before.
Every wireless mouse I've ever owned starts double clicking after like a year and a half or two years. The only exception is the Razer Basilisk I bought about 3 years ago, that ones still ok so far
Do not use Windows. That easy.
Oh. I can stop reading, then.
It's used correctly, you diva.
You're upset with the literal usage of the word literally? I wasn't even using it figuratively for hyperbole.