Anyone Familiar with Microsoft OneDrive?
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scubalab
Posts: 3,101
Well, I'll vent a little first, and say this is another reason we HATE Windows 10...
We got a new laptop at Christmas - nice rig with an i7 processor, folding touchscreen, and dual drives (1 TB HDD and 256 GB SSD). Unfortunately it came with Win 10. Unbeknownst to us, there is this thing called OneDrive on it that apparently mirrors all your documents, videos, and photos on a cloud drive. Well, last night, my wife was saving pictures and videos from our cameras to the computer and she gets a message that the OneDrive was full and we'd have to purchase more space. WTF?
So, she spent hours trying to figure out what was going on. There is TONS of physical drive space available on the laptop. She finally was able to "un-sync" the OneDrive, but (and here's the BIG fail with this stupid OneDrive) apparently, when you do that, it deletes the pictures/documents/videos. And, not only does it delete them from OneDrive, but it also deleted them from our laptop! YES, from the laptop's drive too! (I even made a folder a few weeks ago on the desktop that I dumped hundreds of pictures from our cameras. It deleted all the contents of that folder too!)
Last night, she came to me in a panic, in tears, saying that she'd lost all of it. Also in a panic, I just happened to look in the Recycle Bin, and thankfully, they were there. We had to 'restore' them all, but it put them RIGHT BACK ON OneDrive!
At this point, all I can figure out to do is to 'copy' them from OneDrive to an external hard drive, and then figure out how to get rid of this scam of a program.
HELP! If anyone has any advice or other suggestions, I'll try anything!
Thanks,
-Al
We got a new laptop at Christmas - nice rig with an i7 processor, folding touchscreen, and dual drives (1 TB HDD and 256 GB SSD). Unfortunately it came with Win 10. Unbeknownst to us, there is this thing called OneDrive on it that apparently mirrors all your documents, videos, and photos on a cloud drive. Well, last night, my wife was saving pictures and videos from our cameras to the computer and she gets a message that the OneDrive was full and we'd have to purchase more space. WTF?
So, she spent hours trying to figure out what was going on. There is TONS of physical drive space available on the laptop. She finally was able to "un-sync" the OneDrive, but (and here's the BIG fail with this stupid OneDrive) apparently, when you do that, it deletes the pictures/documents/videos. And, not only does it delete them from OneDrive, but it also deleted them from our laptop! YES, from the laptop's drive too! (I even made a folder a few weeks ago on the desktop that I dumped hundreds of pictures from our cameras. It deleted all the contents of that folder too!)
Last night, she came to me in a panic, in tears, saying that she'd lost all of it. Also in a panic, I just happened to look in the Recycle Bin, and thankfully, they were there. We had to 'restore' them all, but it put them RIGHT BACK ON OneDrive!
At this point, all I can figure out to do is to 'copy' them from OneDrive to an external hard drive, and then figure out how to get rid of this scam of a program.
HELP! If anyone has any advice or other suggestions, I'll try anything!
Thanks,
-Al
Comments
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Good you got them back. That was lucky. Had the order of operations been a little different, that data could have been gone forever.
For now, you can do a move/copy from your local OneDrive folder to your My Pictures folder, or wherever else you want to store them.
OneDrive is just Microsoft's version of Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, or iCloud, etc. It will sync changes across all devices connected to the account, yes. This can be of benefit. I think they'd probably have a way to restore deletions, too. I know Google does. It would only make sense that OneDrive would too, but I realize that's a big assumption that could definitely make A's of U and ME.
Just make sure you're defaulting to the local when you're downloading or saving stuff moving forward.
Also, be sure to have a backup in place, especially if you're not using cloud storage. Have your data in at least two locations. Never just one, and never only on an external HD.I disabled signatures. -
The key is to setup Windows 10 with only local accounts. Do not log into Microsoft account when setting up your user account. I realized when it first came out, that was trouble. The ONLY reason to do that is if you want to sync across multiple devices. PC/Laptop/Windows phone (obsolete)/Windows tablet. Personally, I don't like that. If I want to sync files, I used Dropbox. For email, I have them on Gmail. I don't need Microsoft to do additional syncing. I don't use One Drive for anything.For rig details, see my profile. Nothing here anymore...
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Scott - Thanks for the tips/advice.
Here's the thing. I thought we were saving things to a local folder. I created a folder on the Desktop (likely C:\Users\...\Desktop\Misc Pictures Folder) and dumped a bunch of photos in it a couple weeks ago. Somehow, when my wife 'un-synced' the OneDrive last night, it deleted those pictures too! The folder still existed on the desktop but it was empty. When we restored the photos from the recycle bin, it now shows up as a folder on OneDrive with a little red 'X' next to it. Thankfully, we can copy/paste from there to an external hard drive. All we want to do is save the dang files on the laptop's hard drive!
I agree about having backups. That's typically what we do, save them to a computer HDD, and backup on an external. We just hadn't backed them up yet... -
The key is to setup Windows 10 with only local accounts. Do not log into Microsoft account when setting up your user account. I realized when it first came out, that was trouble. The ONLY reason to do that is if you want to sync across multiple devices. PC/Laptop/Windows phone (obsolete)/Windows tablet. Personally, I don't like that. If I want to sync files, I used Dropbox. For email, I have them on Gmail. I don't need Microsoft to do additional syncing. I don't use One Drive for anything.
I realize that's likely what I did when I set up the laptop at Christmas. And, I agree, I don't like it either.
Is there a way to undo that now and cancel any Microsoft accounts without losing all the stuff that was 'backed up' (that's a poor choice of words given the situation) on OneDrive from the local drive? Is there a way to copy it from the OneDrive to a local drive (although, I swear it was all saved to a local drive to begin with)? -
I'm not sure. I think if you have everything saved to an external drive, you should be fine. There is a setting you can click on to change to a local account. I've done it.For rig details, see my profile. Nothing here anymore...
