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.
DO NOT ENABLE ONE DRIVE.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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”.
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???
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.
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,
- MSYS/Git for Windows: Lightest choice. Least capable. Very easy to set up.
- Cygwin: Only works with Linux stuff made for Cygwin. Pretty useful all in all but really weird to set up. Babun was my favorite way to use it.
- WSL: The most Linux like but at the steep cost of being very disconnected from the Windows side. It feels more like a VM than a shell sometimes.
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.
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.
