One drive is an insanely poorly implemented solution to a problem nobody really had.
For enterprise companies, ones I've worked in at least, they will auto sync the users folder /c/Users/(name) with one drive, but there is some weird alternative they have to set on the windows system to actually use a workspace for the user.
So when I'm on site somewhere, and have no access to a network that's safe, I can't access files that are in my documents folder, pictures or desktop.. when I never asked OneDrive to lift and shift my days off my machine.
I've had the guys turn off one drive explicitly on my machine several times but it keeps reactivating itself as soon as I sign back into the AD.
They can't figure it out, I can't trust it, and the company pays for it.
The whole thing is a cobbled together bodge over SharePoint as a backend. I wouldn't ever trust my company data with that dogwater product.
Back when I had to work with it I found a bug that could cause folders to become un-synced without you realising, meaning changes would not be tracked and cause merge-conflicts when it was fixed.
Managed to use our Gold partner tickets to raise the issue with the product team, they flat out refused to fix the issue even knowing it was a bug. This was back in 2020 or so, I wonder if they ever fixed that bug. It's pretty simple to reproduce:
1. - Sync a nested subfolder from Sharepoint
2. - Sync the parent folder
3. - Note that the folder synced in 1. is not longer being tracked (no checkmark)
4. - Normal users will now go to folder 1. by default and have no idea none of their changes are no longer being tracked now that it's being synced within folder 2.
The university I attend uses SharePoint, classroom and moodle for various courses.
SharePoint is by far the worst piece of software I've ever used. Like, there's no mental model to be done, not intuitive, not working, files disappear from time to time, and I could go on for hours
Come on, a problem nobody really had? I wholeheartedly disagree. Data loss and the orthogonal problem of lacking free space on computers is/was a massive problem at enterprise scale and OneDrive, for all its many shortcomings, is well and truly into good-enough territory to cover the 80% case. I'd go so far as to argue that the scenario you've described is by far the less frequent one. And if it frustrates you, you're afforded the ability to designate files and entire folders to be kept downloaded at all times anyway.
Data loss and storage is always a challenge, that's why companies will have network drives, network storage that's not strongly coupled with your account acess. OneDrive doesn't solve the problem in a clean way. It adds an extra layer of brittleness.
Network storage does not handle the online/offline switching as transparently as OneDrive (or other cloud storage).
For large enterprises that old architecture you refer to means long lead times on network and storage outage notifications, and huge fallout if an outage window is blown.
And if the building network goes down, or if your storage servers are located off site because you’re too big for one building and the commercial internet goes down, etc etc
But it doesn’t have to be OneDrive. There are many other options. I run ownCloud 10 for my personal files. If I were a small to medium business, I would look hard at OCIS.
Network drives mean no local retention and no real good answer for Windows+Mac+Android+iOS clients to remotely access the files. It also doesn't solve sharing those files externally with granular permissions.
All of these kinds things need protection against data loss and centralized control+management, not just the user folder alone.
And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost.
YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.
OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.
>So when I'm on site somewhere, and have no access to a network that's safe, I can't access files that are in my documents folder, pictures or desktop.. when I never asked OneDrive to lift and shift my days off my machine.
Probably enterprise config. Standard OneDrive office 365 enterprise with SharePoint can absolutely work over the "normal internet", you dont need a "network that's safe" whatever that means. VPN? Anyway the big office 365 win was it will work over the normal internet without running /owa open on your exchange server.
>And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost. [...] OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.
In my previous job there was an app(by Dell EMC I think) that would run every day at lunch and backup all your user document folders to some company network drive.
F OneDrive. They locked me out without any explanation and without any notificaiton, ended my subscription and I lost valuable photos forever. Stay away from it if you are looking for storage for any reason.
Indeed, they are probably one of the worst cloud "storage" services ever to exist.
I also lost data on their platform. Not sure why anyone would like to still use them. This follows a pattern of Microsoft mishandling their user's data. They even routinely delete code hosted on their servers when they shutdown services without handling the migration well.
I'm building a digital document archive organizer platform that relies on users' own local machine storage and their cloud storage, and the only provider I trust to support are s3-compatible storage and Google drive (much as I'm wary of Google, Gdrive is reliable). Dropbox, Box, etc are also ok, but the storage is kind of expensive.
There's always an excuse, or perhaps someone who actually went through it might be aware of the process and limitations better than your surface level assumptions?
I don't want to imagine how much mess they have in their backend, given that most Microsoft 365 products rely on SharePoint in one way or another. And then, sometimes you get a "peek" of what's happening behind the scenes (spurious folders, random files appearing, hidden libraries, etc...).
Whenever I was forced to interact with OneDrive, I couldn't help imagining the proverbial digital duct tape holding everything together behind the scenes.
Don’t put your data in onedrive at all. We’ve experienced multiple cases of data loss which were definitely either implementation bugs or files simply being unreadable or lost.
Data is on pragmatic lockout after 3 months, not 12.
For years, enterprises have been conditioned to lean into OneDrive and forget about it. Indeed, that dark pattern is a festering disease across consumer Windows.
It comes up with a scenario where it could be a problem ( license removal ), and then it generates why a license might get removed ( "cost-saving" ).
It's not a person thinking, so there's no real thought to whether it is really a likely scenario, it's just something that sounds plausible.
I read too many blogs, I've come to spot these phrases that trip a feeling of, "Wait, do people really do that?".
You'll still have someone along in the comments to suggest that this article isn't AI slop, and that people really do remove individual one-drive licenses from active people in an organisation to cut costs, that this is just "edited" by AI, etc.
But it's slop from start to finish. Or in LLM speak, "The slop is real".
Related story: I recently watched a new video by a well-known YouTuber whom I was subscribed to for years. Something was off with the video: the script sounded like LLM slop. It sounded as if the author provided some bullet points on the main content of the script, and then let the LLM "expand" on it, with its typical, overly verbose, mode-collapsed LLM style. Then the YouTuber seems to have added some light edits to the script himself because it did sound real occasionally.
This was just after a few minutes of video and I didn't finish watching it. At a quick glance, I didn't see anybody else pointing this out in the comments. Disappointing.
How can I be so certain about LLM usage after just a few minutes? It's both the fact that it sounded like slop, and the fact that I intuitively know his real writing style from past years, and it simply sounded very different this time.
An article about OneDrive being substantially LLM written is sort of okay (who cares about OneDrive by some Office365 blog), but if people you thought you like resort to these methods I feel betrayed.
I had something similar happen where someone linked a blog article, I thought it sounded like slop, especially since they were posting 2-3 articles a day, but I wasn't sure so I checked their back catalogue.
I then saw they've always written like that, and always posted 2-3 articles a day, so I figured they're prolific and LLMs copied their style.
Then I read their first post again, and realised I should check the wayback machine.
Sure enough, they had gone through their entire post history, and had rewritten it with an LLM, to make it less obvious when they started using them.
Now, this was always a bit of a junk site, a knock-off Boing Boing, but it seems incredible to me that someone would replace their original posts with AI gen.
Surely it destroys any reputation you might have?
A site they've been running for nearly 20 years, overwritten by slop.
Damn this is horrible. So the author chose to waste everyone's time by expanding with cow manure. I generally don't read much articles online anymore since they are all likely to contain slop unless authored by known non-slop users.
Retention and legal holds: Data can still be deleted even if a retention policy or legal hold is in place, unless licensing or billing is restored first. Do not rely on holds alone to protect unlicensed data.
Surprising it doesn't automatically move into an admin or company lawyer's drive so it can be dealt with rather then a few notifications which will probably be missed and the data permanently deleted.
You can find multiple comments on past OneDrive posts from people who are/were at Microsoft with frankly terrifying stories of them losing their own or customer data. They all said the same thing: Do not use or trust OneDrive.
IIRC one of the funnier examples was users, their managers, and so on all the way up the chain (perhaps including HR and Legal) being let go resulting in there being no user to transfer the ownership/access to so it was simply deleted.
This will have a huge impact on a lot of organisations, for example those that have a communal SharePoint, or shared document page: files shared from ex-employees for critical documentation is going to break.
Arguably, this situation is already broken right now. If an organization can't be bothered to use their tools (Sharepoint and the wider O365 ecosystem) correctly, it's entirely on them.
AFAIK Sharepoint doesn't have these limitations. The idea is that in companies OneDrive should not be used for permanent stuff. Which is strange, to be granted, but after all using OneDrive for company documents basically means they are being shared out of some personal space that doesn't belong anywhere.
Do you see "personal" and something that looks like your name in the path? That's your personal onedrive, like your home directory on a unix system.
See "sites" in the URL? That's a sharepoint site (AKA teams "shared" folder).
The former disappears (after a year) when the user license is removed. The latter is not associated with an individual user, so even if everyone in a team leaves the company it isn't just automatically removed.
Onedrive is a product that Microsoft bought. It was a box.com/dropbox/g-drive competitor. Microsoft moved Onedrive's backend to Sharepoint some time after the acquisition. As a result it's a bit more integrated, but in unexpected and counterintuitive ways.
And if they haven't migrated the ownership of the OneDrive to another user's account in 12 months (such as cascading the drive up to the next manager to pull out whatever docs)... what kind of other bad IT and managerial practices are in use?
Don't use Microsoft OneDrive. They mine your data and share it with the US government. And - as the International Criminal Court staff has recently discovered - they will cut you off from your data if they, or the US government, decide they don't like you.
One drive is an insanely poorly implemented solution to a problem nobody really had.
For enterprise companies, ones I've worked in at least, they will auto sync the users folder /c/Users/(name) with one drive, but there is some weird alternative they have to set on the windows system to actually use a workspace for the user.
So when I'm on site somewhere, and have no access to a network that's safe, I can't access files that are in my documents folder, pictures or desktop.. when I never asked OneDrive to lift and shift my days off my machine.
I've had the guys turn off one drive explicitly on my machine several times but it keeps reactivating itself as soon as I sign back into the AD.
They can't figure it out, I can't trust it, and the company pays for it.
>One drive is an insanely poorly implemented solution to a problem nobody really had.
I highly doubt that the need to steal as much data and media from people to train AI was a problem nobody really had.
I'd guess it is more about making companies paying more and higher subs than training data.
Standard sub gives 1TB per user.
Laptop drives are still 256 or 512GB in office work.
No real need to pay for "higher subs"
You are conflating private OneDrive with enterprise Office 365 Sharepoint based solution.
Also that came out 10-13 years ago... way before AI. Why are people on this site such midwits?
Downloads folder to the rescue, hallelujah!
Plus the sync results in so many errors and duplicates even on a personal drive with one machine that it is not fit for purpose.
The whole thing is a cobbled together bodge over SharePoint as a backend. I wouldn't ever trust my company data with that dogwater product.
Back when I had to work with it I found a bug that could cause folders to become un-synced without you realising, meaning changes would not be tracked and cause merge-conflicts when it was fixed.
Managed to use our Gold partner tickets to raise the issue with the product team, they flat out refused to fix the issue even knowing it was a bug. This was back in 2020 or so, I wonder if they ever fixed that bug. It's pretty simple to reproduce:
1. - Sync a nested subfolder from Sharepoint
2. - Sync the parent folder
3. - Note that the folder synced in 1. is not longer being tracked (no checkmark)
4. - Normal users will now go to folder 1. by default and have no idea none of their changes are no longer being tracked now that it's being synced within folder 2.
The university I attend uses SharePoint, classroom and moodle for various courses.
SharePoint is by far the worst piece of software I've ever used. Like, there's no mental model to be done, not intuitive, not working, files disappear from time to time, and I could go on for hours
Isn't sharepoint itself a cobbled together on top of Microsoft Exchange mailboxes?
Plus some WebDAV hacks via the MS Frontpage HTML editor! Truly great software engineering and design.
So it's MS products all the way down.
Come on, a problem nobody really had? I wholeheartedly disagree. Data loss and the orthogonal problem of lacking free space on computers is/was a massive problem at enterprise scale and OneDrive, for all its many shortcomings, is well and truly into good-enough territory to cover the 80% case. I'd go so far as to argue that the scenario you've described is by far the less frequent one. And if it frustrates you, you're afforded the ability to designate files and entire folders to be kept downloaded at all times anyway.
Data loss and storage is always a challenge, that's why companies will have network drives, network storage that's not strongly coupled with your account acess. OneDrive doesn't solve the problem in a clean way. It adds an extra layer of brittleness.
Network storage does not handle the online/offline switching as transparently as OneDrive (or other cloud storage).
For large enterprises that old architecture you refer to means long lead times on network and storage outage notifications, and huge fallout if an outage window is blown.
And if the building network goes down, or if your storage servers are located off site because you’re too big for one building and the commercial internet goes down, etc etc
But it doesn’t have to be OneDrive. There are many other options. I run ownCloud 10 for my personal files. If I were a small to medium business, I would look hard at OCIS.
Network drives mean no local retention and no real good answer for Windows+Mac+Android+iOS clients to remotely access the files. It also doesn't solve sharing those files externally with granular permissions.
All of these kinds things need protection against data loss and centralized control+management, not just the user folder alone.
And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost.
YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.
OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.
Seems to me that if you want to experience data loss, Sharepoint is going to cover your needs just fine.
And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost.
YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.
OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.
>So when I'm on site somewhere, and have no access to a network that's safe, I can't access files that are in my documents folder, pictures or desktop.. when I never asked OneDrive to lift and shift my days off my machine.
Probably enterprise config. Standard OneDrive office 365 enterprise with SharePoint can absolutely work over the "normal internet", you dont need a "network that's safe" whatever that means. VPN? Anyway the big office 365 win was it will work over the normal internet without running /owa open on your exchange server.
>And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost. [...] OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.
In my previous job there was an app(by Dell EMC I think) that would run every day at lunch and backup all your user document folders to some company network drive.
F OneDrive. They locked me out without any explanation and without any notificaiton, ended my subscription and I lost valuable photos forever. Stay away from it if you are looking for storage for any reason.
Indeed, they are probably one of the worst cloud "storage" services ever to exist.
I also lost data on their platform. Not sure why anyone would like to still use them. This follows a pattern of Microsoft mishandling their user's data. They even routinely delete code hosted on their servers when they shutdown services without handling the migration well.
I'm building a digital document archive organizer platform that relies on users' own local machine storage and their cloud storage, and the only provider I trust to support are s3-compatible storage and Google drive (much as I'm wary of Google, Gdrive is reliable). Dropbox, Box, etc are also ok, but the storage is kind of expensive.
I would never support OneDrive.
Data request. Or just sue them.
You make it sound way simpler than it is. Their ToS are probably written in a way they are fully protected in cases like this.
There’s always an excuse. You want your “valuable” photos or not? Go get them.
There's always an excuse, or perhaps someone who actually went through it might be aware of the process and limitations better than your surface level assumptions?
‘Just sue a trillion dollar company’ does sound pretty easy.
The whole OneDrive ecosystem is scary as hell.
I don't want to imagine how much mess they have in their backend, given that most Microsoft 365 products rely on SharePoint in one way or another. And then, sometimes you get a "peek" of what's happening behind the scenes (spurious folders, random files appearing, hidden libraries, etc...).
Whenever I was forced to interact with OneDrive, I couldn't help imagining the proverbial digital duct tape holding everything together behind the scenes.
Don’t put your data in onedrive at all. We’ve experienced multiple cases of data loss which were definitely either implementation bugs or files simply being unreadable or lost.
> Let me paint a familiar picture. Someone leaves your organisation, or a licence gets removed as part of a cost-saving exercise.
That's a rather weird way of phrasing it. It almost suggested that you shouldn't audit your license needs.
Other than this was always the case, it's hard to see why data stored in a close account wouldn't get deleted.
Also the deletion will kick in after 12 months
> Day 1: licence removed or user deleted: The clock starts. The OneDrive account is now unlicensed and the retention countdown begins.
> Day 60: read-only mode: No more edits.
So yeah if you spend 12 months without realizing you might need the data of someone who left then I think that's on you
Data is on pragmatic lockout after 3 months, not 12.
For years, enterprises have been conditioned to lean into OneDrive and forget about it. Indeed, that dark pattern is a festering disease across consumer Windows.
This is classic Microsoft long rug pull.
It's LLM phraseology.
It comes up with a scenario where it could be a problem ( license removal ), and then it generates why a license might get removed ( "cost-saving" ).
It's not a person thinking, so there's no real thought to whether it is really a likely scenario, it's just something that sounds plausible.
I read too many blogs, I've come to spot these phrases that trip a feeling of, "Wait, do people really do that?".
You'll still have someone along in the comments to suggest that this article isn't AI slop, and that people really do remove individual one-drive licenses from active people in an organisation to cut costs, that this is just "edited" by AI, etc.
But it's slop from start to finish. Or in LLM speak, "The slop is real".
Related story: I recently watched a new video by a well-known YouTuber whom I was subscribed to for years. Something was off with the video: the script sounded like LLM slop. It sounded as if the author provided some bullet points on the main content of the script, and then let the LLM "expand" on it, with its typical, overly verbose, mode-collapsed LLM style. Then the YouTuber seems to have added some light edits to the script himself because it did sound real occasionally.
This was just after a few minutes of video and I didn't finish watching it. At a quick glance, I didn't see anybody else pointing this out in the comments. Disappointing.
How can I be so certain about LLM usage after just a few minutes? It's both the fact that it sounded like slop, and the fact that I intuitively know his real writing style from past years, and it simply sounded very different this time.
An article about OneDrive being substantially LLM written is sort of okay (who cares about OneDrive by some Office365 blog), but if people you thought you like resort to these methods I feel betrayed.
I had something similar happen where someone linked a blog article, I thought it sounded like slop, especially since they were posting 2-3 articles a day, but I wasn't sure so I checked their back catalogue.
I then saw they've always written like that, and always posted 2-3 articles a day, so I figured they're prolific and LLMs copied their style.
Then I read their first post again, and realised I should check the wayback machine.
Sure enough, they had gone through their entire post history, and had rewritten it with an LLM, to make it less obvious when they started using them.
Now, this was always a bit of a junk site, a knock-off Boing Boing, but it seems incredible to me that someone would replace their original posts with AI gen.
Surely it destroys any reputation you might have?
A site they've been running for nearly 20 years, overwritten by slop.
Compare:
Original: https://web.archive.org/web/20191017113113/https://www.geeky...
Rewritten slop: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/metal-detecting-sandals/
Damn this is horrible. So the author chose to waste everyone's time by expanding with cow manure. I generally don't read much articles online anymore since they are all likely to contain slop unless authored by known non-slop users.
> Someone leaves your organisation
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/retention-and-d...
"By default, when a user is deleted, the user's manager is automatically given access to the user's OneDrive"
Seems like it should be enough time to firesale the data out you need as a manager.
Retention and legal holds: Data can still be deleted even if a retention policy or legal hold is in place, unless licensing or billing is restored first. Do not rely on holds alone to protect unlicensed data.
Surprising it doesn't automatically move into an admin or company lawyer's drive so it can be dealt with rather then a few notifications which will probably be missed and the data permanently deleted.
Don’t worry, you have ~30 days, that should be enough for you to audit your entire org. /s
That number has no connection to the actual system.
You can find multiple comments on past OneDrive posts from people who are/were at Microsoft with frankly terrifying stories of them losing their own or customer data. They all said the same thing: Do not use or trust OneDrive.
IIRC one of the funnier examples was users, their managers, and so on all the way up the chain (perhaps including HR and Legal) being let go resulting in there being no user to transfer the ownership/access to so it was simply deleted.
OneDrive itself should have expired years ago.
I'm not against getting help from AI when writing, but at least take some time to make sure it's not place-filler slop.
AI;DR: Starting from early July 2026, all associated data will be deleted 12 Months after a user license is removed.
Nah, this is just slop.
Took me 10 seconds to find this: https://mc.merill.net/message/MC1381110
"Your OneDrive data..."
No, it's not my OneDrive data. What an infuriatingly click-bait title.
It's OneDrive data for individaul user accounts at organisations that are unlicensed (probably, as the article says, for people that have left).
I'm also unsure what they wanted Microsoft to do. Just store data that apparently doesn't belong to anyone anymore forever?
Pretty fair... if you don't pay, the data doesn't stay
Joke of a company
This will cause some major headaches.
This will have a huge impact on a lot of organisations, for example those that have a communal SharePoint, or shared document page: files shared from ex-employees for critical documentation is going to break.
Arguably, this situation is already broken right now. If an organization can't be bothered to use their tools (Sharepoint and the wider O365 ecosystem) correctly, it's entirely on them.
Organization employees use tools in a way that is practical for them. In microsoft case, it often means "incorrectly" and that is on Microsoft too.
AFAIK Sharepoint doesn't have these limitations. The idea is that in companies OneDrive should not be used for permanent stuff. Which is strange, to be granted, but after all using OneDrive for company documents basically means they are being shared out of some personal space that doesn't belong anywhere.
>shared out of some personal space that doesn't belong anywhere
Do you care explaining this better?
(moreover, to this day I still can't understand the difference between SharePoint and OneDrive -- if there's any)
Do you see "personal" and something that looks like your name in the path? That's your personal onedrive, like your home directory on a unix system.
See "sites" in the URL? That's a sharepoint site (AKA teams "shared" folder).
The former disappears (after a year) when the user license is removed. The latter is not associated with an individual user, so even if everyone in a team leaves the company it isn't just automatically removed.
Onedrive is a product that Microsoft bought. It was a box.com/dropbox/g-drive competitor. Microsoft moved Onedrive's backend to Sharepoint some time after the acquisition. As a result it's a bit more integrated, but in unexpected and counterintuitive ways.
[delayed]
Exactly this!
And if they haven't migrated the ownership of the OneDrive to another user's account in 12 months (such as cascading the drive up to the next manager to pull out whatever docs)... what kind of other bad IT and managerial practices are in use?
Don't use Microsoft OneDrive. They mine your data and share it with the US government. And - as the International Criminal Court staff has recently discovered - they will cut you off from your data if they, or the US government, decide they don't like you.
I wonder why FTP is not enough?