When Windows users suddenly discover that their files have vanished from their desktops after interacting with OneDrive, the issue often stems from how Microsoft’s cloud service integrates with the operating system. The automatic, near-invisible shift to cloud-based storage has triggered strong reactions from users who find the feature unintuitive and, in some cases, destructive to their local files.
Go beat your IT department with hammers. I have roughly a decade in IT with primarily Windows in our environment. There’s no reason for it to suck so bad in a corporate environment. They can disable it entirely very easily, or make it work amazingly well with some effort.
My workplace:
We redirect/sync My Documents and My Pictures to OneDrive seamlessly. If it’s saved in either of those, autosave is on and it’s the same file locally and on onedrive. Files saved follow to any machine. Viewable in explorer always, actually downloaded locally on the fly as needed. Obvious overlaid icon on every file to indicate if it’s synced, syncing, or not available locally (when you’re offline and can’t connect to one drive). You can right click files and folders to easily adjust if they’re always downloaded up to date locally or just on demand.
If there are any conflicts it can’t auto-merge (usually only non-office docs) it saves them with the source computer name appended to the end of the file name so you have each version available, and it pops up a notification that stays until it is manually dismissed, so you know it happened.
If for some reason you’re working on a document outside of the synced folders, office programs do not default to saving in one drive, they default to where the document was opened from or to “My Documents” for new docs, so shit doesn’t get silently moved on you. I can and have had the same doc opened on multiple machines at once, made edits on each, and it worked just like live collaboration with other users.
It doesn’t have to suck, and it’s also easily disableable entirely in enterprise environments if your IT doesn’t want to configure it well. We kept it entirely disabled from our environment until we had our config planned and thoroughly tested with a pilot group for a few months before we let it hit the company as a whole.
Our work does basically all of that…and I hate it. I can’t connect to the corporate One Drive without also being on the corporate VPN since it stores it all on the corporate Share Point server.
They have it set up so it auto deletes everything more than 2 years old. It doesn’t delete folders…so if you don’t look at something frequently all the sudden you just have a bunch of empty folders. Lost my entire ‘Useful SQL queries’ folder contents this way. I wrote them years ago…still useful but because I didn’t change them and just ran them. They’re deleted…WTF?
So now I get to go into the recycle bin in SharePoint and recover files it decided to delete every week. I’m so glad this is ‘saving me time’ and ‘preventing me from losing files’. I’ve lost more files to One Drive in the last year than in the last 20 of just using my local hard drive.
I work for a huge organization and my local IT guys have their hands bound. I couldn’t even make a ripple in that ocean even if I tried.
I’m sorry, that sucks. It really only takes about ten minutes to search up the settings to turn off the saving redirection in Office programs and toss it in the default Group Policy settings, but I’m sure that at a huge org that would end up stuck in absurd change review hell that IT folk seem to try and avoid.
the thing is… you shouldn’t have to “search up the settings to turn off the saving redirection in Office programs and toss it in the default Group Policy settings”. cloud shit in windows and ms office needs to be optional, and explicitly opt in