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Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

216 points by mikecarlton

by nubskr

1 subcomments

Helping my mom recover from OneDrive's "cleanup" was the closest I've come to negotiating with terrorists.

by juancn

16 subcomments

Windows is not for doing serious stuff anymore, the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC (if you turn off all the nags, it's pretty decent).
I work on a Mac, I run servers on Linux, I game on Windows.

by snielson

13 subcomments

I love OneDrive. I don't know why everyone hates it. I save things in OneDrive, and they are backed up to the cloud and synced with the other computers I use.
Some computers are shared by six family members, each with their own MS account and 1TB of storage. OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive but still give everyone ready access to their files by not storing them all on the hard drive.
If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder I create outside Onedrive. I've never had any problems.
The comments by people who hate make me wonder why my experience is so different than theirs.

by davisr

5 subcomments

If you're using Microsoft in 2026, that's on you. You can't be mad at the lawnmower that cut your foot off, it's just doing what it does.

by jwnin

4 subcomments

I use OneDrive at work for all of my documents and have never encountered the horror stories I frequently read. I read these stories often enough where I believe there genuinely is a problem. But I do wonder why there is a difference for some and not others. Perhaps I've conditioned myself to live with its faults?
I will say that the Microsoft Office OneDrive save experience is completely subpar. It behaves completely separate & unlike Windows Explorer and is just unpleasant to work with.

by dmix

1 subcomments

I found out my mom was paying for OneDrive because her Android phone autosynced a bunch of her files and she ran out of 'space'. She had no idea what it was but the OS pushed it hard.
Microsoft gets their tendrils everywhere.

by 51Cards

0 subcomment

First thing I do on any Windows machine is uninstall OneDrive anywhere possible. It's caused me enough grief that I just avoid it entirely at this point.

by phs318u

0 subcomment

The article makes valid points about users misunderstanding how OneDrive works (and ascribing the misunderstanding to “dark patterns”), but I’ve been using Linux (first pop-os and now cachyos) for years, while at the same time shadowing most (not all) of my home directory to OneDrive[0] (I have an annual x365 subscription and that 2TB cloud storage is hard to ignore). I’ve had no issues whatsoever, though admittedly I’m not your average user (40 years in tech). I also make local backups of course, but tbh the utility of having my files available from anywhere is pretty useful to me. YMMV.
[0]. A huge shoutout to the folks behind the amazingly solid https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive

by josefritzishere

0 subcomment

I have had to turn off One Drive after a series of incidents where it deleted or rendered files unrecoverable. It's basically malware to me.

by PaulHoule

0 subcomment

I quit using OneDrive early in the Win 8 era.
To point out how shambloic it was it was originally called SkyDrive but they were forced to rename it thanks to a trademark lawsuit. I mean, they launch a product that is so important to them that they are willing to make us all miserable shoving it down our throats and they can't be bothered to spend a few $100 or $1000 on a trademark search.
I was working with Word and found that it defaulted to OneDrive which I could have lived with if it worked. Except it didn't work and when I tried to save documents I could not save.
Needless to say that was the last time I used OneDrive. Microsoft doesn't get it
```
   Force somebody to use it -> It fails -> Somebody never uses it again
```
Third-party vendors like DropBox, Box and many others have made products that look like OneDrive but actually work and never make it so I can't save my work.
I have OneDrive completely disabled on my personal PC. I still found I couldn't find files that I had created with Word in the filesystem. Turns out even if you don't have the OneDrive service running on your PC, Office will store files in OneDrive directly through the API -- it's not hard to turn off (thanks Copilot!) but it's one more thing to be resentful about.

by newsoftheday

1 subcomments

When I have to use Windows for work (which I 100% would prefer over Mac when I can't have Linux Desktop), I've found OneDrive works best if you give it one file. I gzip a tar file on Windows and let OneDrive sync that. As long as it's only one file, it does a good job.
Whatever you do, don't try to sync a git repo folder with OneDrive.

by recursivedoubts

4 subcomments

OneDrive is an absolute cancer. I teach Computer Science and my students are constantly accidentally checking their repos out onto onedrive which, of course, makes the performance absolutely atrocious to the point of unusability, and it often affects the weakest students who are most likely to get knocked out of CS by unrelated issues like this.
The UI in Windows is intentionally designed to confuse the issue so people unintentionally end up using One Drive, which is free until it isn't and then they can jam you with a subscription. Many of my students barely have an understanding of what a file system is and how it works now due to this horrible user-hostile UI.
MacOS is headed this direction as well. Congrats linux: you just need to continue to get worse at the relatively slow rate that you always have and you will be the best desktop/laptop OS within a few years.

by zeroonetwothree

1 subcomments

I’ve used OneDrive for like 8 years without issues. It works great for me.

by bell-cot

2 subcomments

Maintaining local, off-line backups is an endless PITA.
But consider the alternative... :(

by cadamsdotcom

1 subcomments

In a healthy market with viable competition this would either not happen or be swiftly corrected by a massive drop in market share.
So what’s gone wrong?

by apexalpha

0 subcomment

Every time I need to add my file and send it out I manually download it first.
The shenanigans that happen when you 'link' to files, or not, from Teams to Outlook to Sharepoint is beyond me.
They also constantly sneak it into Word. If you don't pay close attention they suddenly save your local file to some Cloud Desktop folder.

by AlexandrB

1 subcomments

Saw someone calling Microsoft "Microslop". Seems appropriate given their enthusiasm for AI, lack of software quality, and lack of regard for user experience.

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

[dupe]
OneDrive just deleted all of my files
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493506

by SanjayMehta

1 subcomments

I use iCloud, Dropbox and OneDrive for family, professional use and junk files respectively.
Works out really well. They all work perfectly for their intended uses.

by ryandvm

2 subcomments

MS has been doing shit like this for decades. Every couple months I log into my dusty Windows account and lo and behold there's a bunch of weird shit like Candy Crush or Copilot or whatever that's just decided to reinstall itself for the nth time.
I just noticed yesterday that Copilot or OneDrive is pressuring me to set it up and my options are: Yes, Remind me in 1 week, or Remind me in 1 month. Like, what the fuck is that?
It is a testament to the power of tech policy momentum that a company can crank out absolute shit for decades and the corporate world just keeps on using their software because "that's what we've always used".
As far as I'm concerned, I'm fine with these tech CTOs replacing their software engineering workforce with LLMs because the bar is already on the fucking floor when it comes to use experience.

by expedition32

0 subcomment

What I hate about it is that it's turned on automatically.
It's basically just holding your computer for ransom because guess what the 20 gigabyte they give you for free doesn't cut it lmao. Don't call it a backup my SSD is 2 terrabyte and I ain't paying you anything.

by joecool1029

0 subcomment

Yeah I was in the minority that actually defended OneDrive but I'm facing my own issues with it recently. I'm aware of the windows default client behavior but on systems I have the storage on, I modify it to pull down everything. Bad UX on Microsoft's part but it's not related to what appears to be bigger issues under the hood.
Back in October I had issues with the Linux dlang Onedrive client deleting all the files shared with me. Unlike Microsoft, the developer actually acknowledged there could be a problem and we figured out the cause was new unintended behavior caused by an old config option, really long issue thread for it here: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/issues/3475 (TL:DR it was a very niche situation unlikely to have affected anyone else, I have more concise thoughts on it in the Gentoo bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/964370 )
So that was really bad, but we were able to restore all the deleted files from her OneDrive web using its recycle bin. That leaves me with the issue I'm facing now. Some of the files which I created and put in the share she shares with me have my ownership but OneDrive doesn't recognize I created it and she can't change the permissions to share back to me. So now I have to figure out how many files are affected here and I guess copy them on her side so the new files get her ownership and share back properly to me.
I do want to say as well, those files just don't show up at all on my side in OneDrive but they DO show up in my Office apps recent list. It just refuses to let me open them. She sees them though with my ownership and both the web and windows onedrive clients throw errors if she tries to change the permissions. Absolutely maddening.

by Forgeties79

4 subcomments

Whelp browsing this on my phone was one way to remind me to put my VPN back on holy crap. In the middle of the article is an embedded TikTok video about the subject of the article while three different ads were overlapping my screen. Unbelievable.

by meetingthrower

1 subcomments

...and even if they suck it into onedrive, good luck finding it! Is it in my work onedrive, personal onedrive, a "teams" folder, or did they relabel it to a sharepoint folder? No idea! Everything is now saved on my downloads folder because my file system is so whacked with all these other virtual folder overlays....

by OptionOfT

0 subcomment

It's interesting because on one hand there are posts like this were most people agree, and then there are posts about LLMs how they can one-shot a Windows application.
I think they're related. Software Engineering is about enumerating these edge cases and dealing with them. That requires skill.
Vibe-coding, or even prompting for larger chunks of code doesn't force you to enumerate these edge-cases.
And I firmly believe that reviewing the code for those edge-cases is harder than writing it yourself, as by nature you have to work backwards. You've arrived at a place, and you need to find out which routes were taken, and whether those routes are correct. Guardrails, snow-chain warnings, slope % warnings etc.
When you've arrived at the place it's easy to say: eh, whatever. We got here. Ship it. Especially with the push from above these days to go faster.

by senectus1

0 subcomment

I support an environment with well over 20k devices across windows, android and ios that use one drive.
no major issues here. sure its got the occasional bug, and is missing some features i think it should have... but all in all its very usable.

by standardly

0 subcomment

I absolutely can't deal with sync conflicts, they are confusing and infuriating. So I don't use any form of automatic cloud sync, anywhere. Once you accidentally overwrite a file with an older version open on another system, its hard to go back to that nonsense

by lovegrenoble

0 subcomment

F* OneDrive

by piker

1 subcomments

Happened to me 2 nights ago with a document my wife was editing on my laptop. I booted up Windows, which forced me to start some process while I was half paying attention. Windows booted normally but my Desktop was missing that critical file.
It was in my history? Check
Recent documents? Check
Visible in the file explorer? Check
Desktop? No dice
Try to open from the file dialog... error. The message? Can't get it from some URL.
My wife wakes up and starts crying. She's spent hours. What the fuck? I understand computers, and files don't just disappear.
"Were you editing it with Tritium?" (blames my product!)
Wait, a URL? I bet it's some OneDrive dark pattern.
Fix it by de-selecting "backup" multiple times and then clicking "submit". Files magically re-appear after I make sure to tell Microsoft to "keep my local copy".

by dkdcio

6 subcomments

maybe I’m just getting old, but I’m really tired of these [super popular product tons of people use but EVERYONE hates it] posts and comments. just quickly checking the Apple App Store, the Onedrive app has 4.7 stars
does everyone hate it?

by greatgib

5 subcomments

[flagged]

by p_ing

3 subcomments

One user's stupidity becomes Internet bait for something that's saved so, so much time.
I remember playing the backup & restore game when rebuilding my PC, which I just happened to do last night as I received a new SSD. I didn't have to worry about documents and thanks to a separate volume, redownloading my Steam library, either. That was a massive time save. And it didn't have to be OneDrive, it could have been any cloud sync service -- but OneDrive works just fine.
The user just fucked up and had a conniption fit on Tiktok.