this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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This is insane bullshit on Microsoft’s part for sure
…buuuuuuuut
Storing your most important, irreplaceable pictures on someone else’s computer ONLY, with no control over them? That’s an insane practice.
It’s probably also on his computer, but now inaccessible without the Microsoft account that contains the bitlocker key for that data
You know, like how fucking ransomware works
Ransomeware As An OS
rrrrraaao~ :3
Unfortunately, Microsoft is making it more and more difficult to actually save things to your local devices. OneDrive went from being just convenient cloud backup to "oh we're your hard drive now"
That’s wild! My Final Windows(TM) is Windows 10 LTSC IoT so I have not experienced that. I don’t really see Onedrive anywhere, thanks to OOSU. I just wish this configuration was more easily accessible to average users.
It's advertised as cloud storage and incredibly dependable. It business leaders tell people that the cloud is the best because they use it. What they fail to tell you is that you don't meyet to them and they will delete you for any reason.
The advertising is really gross, and so is the required account, one drive on by default, all of it is gross. Someone posted a link to a Nexus interview I’m watching now where folks who have windows installed with a Microsoft account have had their account hax’d and bitlocker enabled on their machine (in all of its backdoored “security” glory) and a pin put on their machine from a threat actor. Insanity! Ain’t no way I’m goin near that
I'm with you, 100%. Each of these big corpos is creating massive ecosystems to entrap users.
If it worked properly I would have no problem telling people to do that. You may show people how to back up to a hard disk, but they'll likely not do it. A service that does the backup automatically without the user having to do anything is very useful.
The problem is that it doesn't work properly.
I would never tell anyone to store their most important files only in one place! On top of that, the one place being not your own computer?!
I think these cloud companies have been pretty successful convincing people that at-home storage is more at-risk than the cloud because you could always have a house fire or something, or your hard drive could fail, or whatever. But it seems the pendulum is now swinging the other way as people get wise to the inherent dangers of only keeping things on the cloud, and trusting a company with your data no less.
Computer + cloud backup seems a pretty sensible solution to me. But I'm talking about people who are really not into computers.
One thing a lot of people here seem to miss: The onedrive app actually calls it "Backup". So users assume they have a copy of it on their computer and it is "backed up" to OneDrive.
But the other thing OneDrive does is turn on "Selective Sync", where it will actually delete the files off your local device "to free up storage". It looks like it is on your local computer, but when an app goes to use it, OneDrive quickly downloads it so the app is none the wiser that it wasn't actually there a moment ago. This is all seamless to the user, until one day they are offline and can't get to most of their files, or they lose access to their Microsoft account.
Everything a user needs to know is in the interface, Microsoft gives little symbols on the file to specify if there is a local copy or not, but most users have no idea what any of that means.
To top it off, just a little icing on the cake, if a user signs into the computer with a Microsoft account, bitlocker (full disk encryption) is automatically turned on, and the recovery key is shoved in their Microsoft account. This is convenient, but if they lose access to their Microsoft account, they can't log into the computer to get it, and they can't log into the website to get the bitlocker key. So even if their files are still on the PC, they have zero way to recover them.
Honestly, they've created a very convenient system, until it is impossible to recover anything. Business Environments have administrators that can help users by resetting their passwords or pulling a bitlocker key out of Intune, but for a home user? You're just SOL.
Oh totally. But this thread and the comment you replied to are talking about using ONLY someone else’s computer as a storage location, not redundancy.
I do agree, using only cloud backup storage is a bad idea.
Sorry; did not mean to molest anyone.
The answer is DropBox with full sync. I have an actual folder on my PC with all my data on it, plus it's backed up to the cloud with version control, plus accessible from my phone (or any operating system) in a pinch. Not a shill but I've been using DropBox for actual decades even on Linux and never had a single issue.
Microsoft and other cloud services are known for loosing users data. No joke.
When this all started all those years ago, I said to myself I’m not gonna trust any corporation to any of my stuff without a copy. Always used backup CD’s and hard drives, etc.
Hell yeah, saaaame. I do now upload super important stuff in already-encrypted bundles to vetted, trustable, e2e online storage services just in case. But everything else is local server, externals, and discs I need to put on those hard drives now that disc rot is starting to be a thing.
Buuuuuut Microsoft advertises OneDrive as the best way to store data. And since it is such huge and known corporation, I am not surprised less knowledgeable people trust them. I bet most people don't know, OneDrive isn't on their computer. So I hope, you don't blame the victim and only try to inform others about better practices.