Windows Insiders with SD cards turn into OneDrive outsiders

Microsoft has tried to DoS its forum servers, by changing its OneDrive consumer policy to only support cloud backups of NTFS-formatted drives without warning users first. Unsurprisingly, that's lit up the forums with complaints, because people only found out when OneDrive popped up error messages. Windows 10 insiders copped …

[tjdennis2]

Place holders

The new Place Holders feature in OneDrive required changes to NTFS to support the virtual files. I guess they assumed they couldn't support other file systems if Place Holders wasn't something you could just disable.

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is all about Placeholders, here's one: The K Edition of Windows 10.

I have my Windows 10 folder/placeholder already created for the K Edition of Windows 10. We've already decided on the naming convention for the Oct/Nov 2017 release of Windows 10.

Why K-Edition?

Windows 10 F'CU, "K Ed.ition".

[Mpeler]

Re: If this is all about Placeholders, here's one: The K Edition of Windows 10.

Yep. From "One Drive" to "NONE DRIVE".

Way to go, Satan Nutella, you've børked everyone again...

[Dan 55]

Re: Place holders

When they had place holders in Windows 8 it didn't need NTFS.

Just another excuse for lock-in to keep the Nice Try File System relevant.

[Trilkhai]

Re: Place holders

Nice Try File System is far too kind — I've been known when frustrated to call it "Not This Fucking Shit!".

[Jonathan 27]

Re: Place holders

That's why they didn't work properly and programs would try to open the placeholder file instead of downloading the file properly. That is why they killed the feature and re-wrote it.

[Dan 55]

Re: Place holders

Dropbox seem to have worked it out without this restriction though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

It's like they WANT to piss their customer base off so bad that the customers go elsewhere.

Web cam works? *Apply update* Not anymore.

Microphone works? *Update* Not anymore!

File system works? *Update* Not anymore!

What's next, MS deciding to remove your networking device drivers as a "security measure to protect against hackers"? I'm sure THAT will go over well when their customers can no longer get online...

[Nate Amsden]

Re: Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

I think they did that one already

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/09/mysterious_windows_10_networking_bug/

[Nate Amsden]

Re: Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

I have been linux on the desktop/laptop since about 1997 now, wow has it been that long. But I still have a windows 7 VM and my main computer is still dual boot with windows 7 (one of the last laptops that sold with windows 7).

I have used a bit of windows 2012 (always quickly installed classic shell, though have no intention of using windows 10 as long as win7 still works. Shit, even my recent windows server deployments were all 2008R2(windows makes up less than 1% of my server infrastructure).

MS just seems hell bent on screwing power users over, it is quite unfortunate. I used to be hard core anti MS back in the 90s, but was getting to like them(even bought several copies of windows 7 and Visio) up until they started the windows 10 push.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

"What's next, MS deciding to remove your networking device drivers as a "security measure to protect against hackers"?

I'm pretty sure it was during the Creator's update that a lot of the vendor's wifi card drivers were replaced with a generic Microsoft one that didn't work so well.

[Mage]

Re: Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

Indeed. The entire philosophy of making Windows into a bad copy of Android is crazy. Windows 10, Windows Store, One Drive etc are stupid and possibly illegal too.

[John Smith 19]

"The entire philosophy of making Windows into a bad copy of Android is crazy. "

Ahhhhhhh.

The light dawns with the intensity of a nuclear weapon.

That's the reason for all this crazy s**t.

Microsoft are remembering the days when they were an effective monopoly.

The good old days (for Microsoft)

"We can do anything. We don't care if users don't like it. They'll whine a bit then do it anyway. Because we're Microsoft."

[Mage]

Re: Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

You left out AUTOMATIC Win10 update that updated FIRMWARE and bricked Win10 x86 Tablets with keyboards used as Netbooks.

Not recoverable without special programming hardware and original firmware.

All of the MS "Cloudy" stuff seems to be a broken menace on a laptop / net book / x86 tablet used in traditional windows fashion to create / edit content.

[Fibbles]

Re: Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

You forgot the anniversary update that messed up the partition table on dual boot systems. They subdivided the Windows partition to create a recovery partition but when rebuilding the partition table assumed anything with a filesystem that Windows doesn't native support was just empty space. Goodbye grub, goodbye Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

The network removal will be hailed as a triumph of customer service

Since, unlike this debacle, there'll very few complaints logged on the MS forum servers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

It's like they WANT to piss their customer base off so bad that the customers go elsewhere.

I'm getting the impression they merely want to filter out the recalcitrant sheep so they know what's left will accept anything. At which point prices will go up..

[Christian Berger]

Re: Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

"It's like they WANT to piss their customer base off so bad that the customers go elsewhere."

Maybe they see this as the reason why Apple is so successfull?

[Paul Shirley]

Re: Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

My network regularly vanishes after letting update shit all over win10.

[fobobob]

Re: Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

Had some twit at a datacenter (softlayer, pre-IBM) respond to a (not particularly terrible) DDoS attack by, in his own paraphrased/summarized words "drop protocol 6 to port 80 and protocol 17 to port 53". This was on an Arbor TMS, which has much more advanced attack mitigation capabilities than just knocking a shared (several hundred customers) webserver off of the Internet. Point is, assume incompetence followed by laziness in this case.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Sky blue, water wet, MS fucking over customers...

heh. I love the reference. "And old Satan Clause, he's out there"

[The Last Boy Scout]

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been going on with Win10 for a couple years, Win8 too if I recall

One workaround was to format the SD card as NTFS, then use disk manager to assign it to an empty folder on the C drive. Not sure if it still works. I don't like syncing cloud services or backup services to SD cards. Windows has a funny habit of reassigning drive letters occasionally if a card pops out by accident. Could cause another external drive to be overwritten.

[Nate Amsden]

Re: This has been going on with Win10 for a couple years, Win8 too if I recall

Not that I need to sync with this but isn't the point of not using NTFS so the SD card is portable to other systems whether a camera, or something ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This has been going on with Win10 for a couple years, Win8 too if I recall

Yes, but if you were going to dedicate the card for OneDrive sync, NTFS used to have some advantages over FAT32 and exFAT in terms of search speed, compression, large file size, security settings. I'm assuming things haven't changed much in that regard the past couple of years.

[Anonymous Coward]

"to other systems whether a camera, or something ??"

If you're using a card in a camera, you usually don't want anything else but the camera messes with the card contents. You usually copy files out of the card, but let the camera manage the card. Most camera software is not designed to cope with cards managed also by other systems, they usually follow "Design rule for Camera File system", and may not like alterations to its structure.

I would never attempt to sync a card used in a camera directly with OneDrive or anything alike (unless the camera has specific support), if a backup is needed copy the data to a OneDrive folder elsewhere.

Cards used elsewhere as portable disks are another matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "to other systems whether a camera, or something ??"

LDS - "I would never attempt to sync a card used in a camera directly with OneDrive or anything alike"

Me neither. That would be begging for chaos.

[jelabarre59]

Re: "to other systems whether a camera, or something ??"

I would never attempt to sync a card used in a camera directly with OneDrive or anything alike (unless the camera has specific support), if a backup is needed copy the data to a OneDrive folder elsewhere.

Exactly. Just load MobaXterm or Cygwin on that sucker, and rsync your OneDrive folder to the SD card.

[bombastic bob]

Re: This has been going on with Win10 for a couple years, Win8 too if I recall

"isn't the point of not using NTFS so the SD card is portable to other systems whether a camera, or something"

pretty much, yeah. Or a Linux computer, for that matter.

/me wonders if there will EVER be a 'user file system' (as in non-kernel), such as 'Fuse', but on winders, where people can pretty much do "whatever they want" just like in Linux and FreeBSD.

next, the ability to format exFAT or FAT or FAT32 will be removed...

[michael.moon]

Re: This has been going on with Win10 for a couple years, Win8 too if I recall

This is all well and good , BUT most cameras in fact I will say I have yet to see a camera that supports NTFS on a media card, so yay it works with windows, crap the camera can't use it anymore.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This has been going on with Win10 for a couple years, Win8 too if I recall

"so yay it works with windows, crap the camera can't use it anymore."

Dear Microsoft, your software means this no longer works with my camera, and you chose not to warn me. Cheque please.

[jelabarre59]

Re: This has been going on with Win10 for a couple years, Win8 too if I recall

This is all well and good , BUT most cameras in fact I will say I have yet to see a camera that supports NTFS on a media card, so yay it works with windows, crap the camera can't use it anymore.

Cameras, tablets and media players should have just moved to EXT4 (or something similar) years ago. Adding native support to MSWin would be a simple matter of installing an IFS driver just *once*, and it would be usable regardless of the portable device it came from. Make a user-space application for those systems where you don't have the rights to install drivers. Again, just one portable r/w application would handle any device's memory card. So blatantly obvious there must be some bribery preventing it from happening.

[RudderLessIT]

Silly Question

Why would someone want to synchronise their SD card to a cloud provider?

I get why they would want to upload from an SD to another location. And having files available offline is an equally obvious need.

But why would you want to combine the two? What am I missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Silly Question

Cause people are buying "cloudbook" laptops these days with almost zero drive space. It's tempting to be able to keep your documents and pics sync'ed to a 128GB SD card, when all your laptop gives you is 16GB or 32GB, most of which is taken up by Windows.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Silly Question

"when all your laptop gives you is 16GB or 32GB, most of which is taken up by Windows."

last I checked, Raspbian fit in 4G

Just sayin'

/me can do a tarball backup to a google drive on Linux. works for me! Use TXZ!!! (it rhymed!)

[Adelio]

Re: Silly Question

Why are you using onedrive at all. Why are you trusting Micro$oft with your data. One day you will get a message saying that you have not clicked on enough advents and they are deleting all your one drive data!.

I have hundreds of gig of photos and the same with music. I back up to a local NAS drive. Much safer. Less likley that Microsoft will shaft it!

For me a cloud backup would be the LAST thing i would use.i.e. the least trustworthy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Silly Question

that's maybe unfair - I'll give MS a chance to keep one of the copies of data. Of course, Judge Preska has to sign an unlimited personal liability guarantee for it's privacy / security first.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Silly Question

"Why are you using onedrive at all. Why are you trusting Micro$oft with your data. One day you will get a message saying that you have not clicked on enough advents and they are deleting all your one drive data!"

Yeah - No. My company pays for some OneDrive storage, and also some DropBox. There's no "clicking on adverts". I've never heard of MS even employing such a system anyway. Apparently, using cloud services such as OneDrive and DropBox to sync data to agents in the field is important to my company. Imagine that.

However, I agree with your basic premise - I do nightly backups of the data in my care to disk. I don't trust any cloud provider that much.

[Anonymous Coward]

Industry Std

So NTFS is the industry standard.

Colour me incredulous.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Wut?

the industry standard of support for NTFS

That's a new one. I thought it was FAT?

[Steve Davies 3]

YAFGMFM

Yet Another Foot Gun Moment For Microsoft.

Will they ever learn?

I hope not as their antics provide endless enjoyment for the likes of those who comment here, MS FanBois excluded.

Didn't the Final FAT patents just expire? Perhaps that is a reason? I seem to remember reading that 2017 was the expiry time for those Patents.

If that is true then they don't their their tithes/usury/royalties from the SD Card makers and kit that uses SD cards, they are turning their attention to NTFS where the patent bandwagon still applies.

[Bob Vistakin]

Move everything over to the microsoft cloud

It'll be fine they said. I'll never have to worry about losing data again, they said. So I drank the kool aid and ... you're not using our file system, so fuck off, they said.

[Ken Hagan]

"even Redmond creations like the Resilient File System (ReFS) are blocked"

So yet another case of their right hand not knowing what their left hand is doing.

MS have looked for many years like they no longer have functioning management. Individual projects may roll out OK, but the bigger picture is lost. Two different control panels ever since Win8? Check. But that was 5 years ago, so surely it has been resolved by now. Oh dear. Patchy support even amongst the built-in utilities (like the aforementioned control panel) for hi-dpi displays ever since Vista. Check. But that was 10 years ago, so surely it has been resolved by now. Oh dear.

So if the entire senior management team falls over in the forest, does anyone actually notice?

[Anonymous Coward]

if the entire senior management team falls over in the forest...

...you could sell the co-ords for this happy event on eBay:

Customers who bid on this item also bid on "Sturdy garden spade" and "Quicklime, jumbo bag"

[Kevin Johnston]

Re: if the entire senior management team falls over in the forest...

I would have thought the answer was obvious from the huge cheer bursting forth from said forest as the team bites the loam. People near the scene may spot a glimpse of the BOFH and PFY strolling away pints in hand smiling at a job well done.

[ecofeco]

MS have looked for many years like they no longer have functioning management.

Because they haven't. Some folks I know who USED to work there confirm that the departments are as silo-ed as they come.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they haven't. Some folks I know who USED to work there confirm that the departments are as silo-ed as they come.

More so than IBM?? I seriously doubt that's even possible.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uninstall OneDrive

As part of setting up Windows 10 (set to local account, delete adware & trash, turn on privacy etc) on customers PCs I also uninstall OneDrive. Much better to backup to memory sticks, DropBox or Google, or just email to yourself).

[Mage]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

Or your own hosting / server / whatever.

[Geoff Campbell]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

Is that what the customers ask you to do? Or do you impose a crippled system on them because you hate them?

It's no wonder some people hate the IT industry.

GJC

[Dan 55]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

If it's for corporate, they probably do want that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

Or do you impose a crippled system on them because you hate them?

That would be leaving OneDrive in place. There are many, more functional alternatives out there which represent far less risk and are less keen to lock client data into a proprietary vault.

[hplasm]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

" Or do you impose a crippled system on them because you hate them?"

Are you talking to Microsoft here?

[Timmy B]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

"Much better to backup to memory sticks, DropBox or Google"...

Ok what one of those gives you 5 installations of Office and 5TB of storage for less than a tenner a month?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

Ok what one of those gives you 5 installations of Office and 5TB of storage for less than a tenner a month?

Good point, I missed that, probably because we've been using LibreOffice for years. It's shocking just how much money we must have saved, but that wasn't the original aim. The aim was to reduce risk of security issues and removing exposure to licensing scams "schemes". True, that translates into costs too but it's more about not having to worry.

I cannot tell you how good it feels not to use anything by Microsoft at all, and it's far better than recovering from your average addiction: in this case, there's absolutely NO craving to ever go back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

5TB of storage for less than a tenner a month

1 - that's 5TB if it would actually work..

2 - ever tried to fill 5TB through a network straw?

3 - that's 5TB lost if they screw up - and their track record confirms they eventually will.

It may be worth considering a more reputable company..

[Timmy B]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

I disagree:

1. I am currently at over 3TB across the accounts and it all works fine. I sync across multiple PCs and tablets and even my phone has easy access. Works perfectly.

2. You don't fill it all at once, silly.

3. I have a backup of course. And Google / Dropbox / Amazon, whoever are all as likely to mess up.

I don't need to - MS are doing sterling work. They are for the company I work for and the company my partner works for. No complaints at all - and I suspect that outside the small bubble that is the Reg - they do fine for pretty much every customer.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

"They are for the company I work for and the company my partner works for. ... the small bubble that is the Reg"

ROFLMAO

[hplasm]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

" I suspect that outside the small bubble that is the Reg - they do fine for pretty much every customer."

MS user forums say the opposite.

What are you on?

[Adam JC]

Re: The Need For Speed

"...outside the small bubble that is the Reg"

Think you'll find the Reg readership/commentards cover pretty much every arm of the industry and even some that don't fall under 'I.T'

[Jonathan 27]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

I'm cool with it.

1. This is the most minor thing in the world, this only affects a very specific use-case and you can get around it by converting your drive to NTFS.

2. Some of us have 1Gbps bidirectional fibre.

3. Haven't yet, I've had OneDrive (SkyDrive) since the beginning.

In case you plan on saying anything else, I do have local backups as well, but I want an extra set of copies in case the place goes down in flames.

Besides, who's "more trustworthy"? Google? Amazon? All the giant multi-nationals would sell you out for a nickle if they thought they could get away with it.

[Dan 55]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

Why would you want to convert to NTFS if there's FAT for compatibility or ZFS for integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

ZFS on a SD card? ZFS works well with many disks and a lot of RAM. Probably not what you're going to use on your average small laptop. ZFS on a single disk is mostly useless.

FAT is not a reliable file system - do people already forgot the DOS/Win 9x issues?

Cameras use it (mostly exFAT, today), because it's fast, simple to implement, and with very little overhead. All they care is getting the data out of the buffer to the storage as fast as they can. They don't care about journaling, ACLs, concurrent accesses to files...

FAT is also the lowest common denominator, so it's good for moving files across different systems, but it's a PITA for long term storage.

[Tom 64]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

> "1. This is the most minor thing in the world, this only affects a very specific use-case and you can get around it by converting your drive to NTFS."

Making your SD card useless for anything other than Windows machines.

> "2. Some of us have 1Gbps bidirectional fibre."

Most people don't.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

"what one of those gives you 5 installations of Office and 5TB of storage for less than a tenner a month?"

I think you missed the bit that said "represent far less risk and are less keen to lock client data into a proprietary vault".

[P. Lee]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

>Ok what one of those gives you 5 installations of Office and 5TB of storage for less than a tenner a month?

$10/month = $360 over three years which gives you 8TB of NAS-quality disk from any pc corner shop. You also get around 900Mb/s transfer rate rather than the soggy string a cloud provider gives you.

So faster and an extra 3TB of storage and from there the comparison only gets less favourable. You can also have as many installations of LibreOffice as you want. I have seven laptops, three servers and three desktops in the house. To cover those, I'll need to buy Windows 10 and pay $20/month (for end user devices only). The "servers" are old devices because my needs are small and I don't trust virtualisation in terms of putting them all on one physical device (they are internet-facing). Now I need to license Windows server for 8 cores on core-2 duo hosts. I'm running SMTP and webmail on-prem, so that's an exchange license too. You do back up your Outlook-Online email to an on-prem device don't you? MS doesn't do backups.

So my ROI is down to one and a half years on the disk purchase alone. Plus, a lot of the devices are old and I'll need to buy new windows 10 licenses *for each device* if I want to do the ecological thing and re-use old kit.

Windows licensing doesn't scale. Yes, MS Office is *much* better than LibreOffice - but not *that* much better. Let's face it, we keep all the windows infrastructure around to support Excel, Outlook calendaring and Visio.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

$10/month = $360 over three years which gives you 8TB of NAS-quality disk from any pc corner shop. You also get around 900Mb/s transfer rate rather than the soggy string a cloud provider gives you.

Agree with all of that, but on-site storage will be of sod-all help if you (1) need to share files with others, (2) work from home or (3) have a Grenfell Tower sort of problem - one of the sales arguments for cloudy stuff is that it forms an off-site backup.

That is, of course, when it actually works. I hear from a good friend of mine that their taxpayer funded OneNote experience is far from impressive, so I'm glad I never even felt the temptation to try.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

I think if it costs me $10/month I can afford a new 4G SD card every month to copy important stuff to, and throw it in a drawer somewhere. Or for a few months' cost, maybe an external USB drive...

I also burn backups to DVD once in a while. tax time is a good time for this. I keep them in a fireproof safe with other important schtuff. Old school, yeah.

[James O'Shea]

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

"As part of setting up Windows 10 on customers PCs I also uninstall OneDrive."

How do you do that? When last I checked (last week...) it was possible to _disable_ OneDrive in Win 10, but not kill it. Apparently MS borrowed some tech from Facebook and the Hotel California.

[Anonymous Coward]

"DropBox or Google"

And how they are better than OneDrive, especially Google? It's just a matter of choosing in what pan you like to be fried.

Mailing to yourself it's exactly what many data leak protection software try to block... just like USB disks and non-company approved cloud storage.

[EddieD]

An insider build.

So, technically, a beta, not a release copy?

Annoying, irritating, and probably a damned stupid idea, but isn't the purpose of betas and previews to test things before general release?

And don't folk on the insider program get warned that things might not work the way that they think that they should?

Methinks the insiders protest too much.

[Baldrickk]

Re: An insider build.

Well if the insiders don't complain when testing the beta builds, the average user gets shafted when it goes through to release without opposition.

highlighting (complaining about) problems (and reduction in functionality where that functionality is used is most definitely a problem) is kinda the point of the whole insider program...

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: An insider build.

"So, technically, a beta, not a release copy?

...

Methinks the insiders protest too much."

The purpose of a beta test is to get users to report bugs. Unless you're just pottering about you don't turn round and tell the bug reporters that that's what it's supposed to do.

[EddieD]

Re: An insider build.

Aye you can report bugs.

But using it for your day to day system or for a production system is specifically stated by Microsoft as a bad idea as things may not work, systems may get screwed up, functionality may not be what you expected.

Whinging about it on Reddit, saying "WHAT A FECKING LIBERTY" rather than saying "In this preview build, losing ResFS or FAT32 access to OneDrive seems to be bit of retrograde step" is just stupid.

It's a beta. It's not meant for general use. Report errors, post about errors, say why you think it's a bad idea.

Reacting like 3 year old who has spat out his dummy is just lame.

[Baldrickk]

Re: An insider build.

Granted, you shouldn't be using it for a production system, but if you are / want to be an insider, you should be using it as a day-to-day system.

There is little point booting up, checking that you can run your browser and maybe one or two other maps and calling it a day.

If you are not following a particular testing process, then you need to exercise the system as much as possible. Maybe don't use it as your (only) storage for all your important documents etc, but you should most definitely be using it as much as possible, so that if there are problems, you are more likely to run into them.

[Timmy B]

Why not choice..?

I do wish that they gave us choice. I don't care - really don't care if syncing a file takes a tiny bit longer. Pop up a box when I select an SD card telling me it'll be a tiny bit slower and let me say "Nah - don't care". But then again this is a feature in BETA software that may never reach end users. I imagine that they will try stuff and see if it flies. We do exactly the same with our stuff - preview releases designed just for feedback.

[Alumoi]

Re: Why not choice..?

Pray tell which version of Windows 10 is NOT beta? Insider builds are alpha, what the suckers get is beta. And, as MS said, Windows 10 is a rolling release, so there's no final build.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes!

Another two-minute hate on MSFT.

You are spoiling us Mr El Reg!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yes!

Hate that is thoroughly deserved, and hopefully manages to wake up some of the Microsofties.

[Adelio]

Why use onedrive, or any cloud backup

Why are you using onedrive at all. Why are you trusting Micro$oft with your data. One day you will get a message saying that you have not clicked on enough advents and they are deleting all your one drive data!.

I have hundreds of gig of photos and the same with music. I back up to a local NAS drive. Much safer. Less likley that Microsoft will shaft it!

For me a cloud backup would be the LAST thing i would use.i.e. the least trustworthy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why use onedrive, or any cloud backup

Kept in a fire safe too?

[tim 13]

How does it work on a Mac, or an iPhone then?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never use it, but went ahead and updated for shits and giggles. Well, the darn thing worked fine. Sigh. Not sure, but it seems the requirement for NTFS is limited to the Windows variety of the application. OneDrive is happily working with my HFS+ encrypted internal hard drive.

[James O'Shea]

I have OneDrive installed on my Win 10 systems, and my Macs, and my iDevices. I have, allegedly, a glorious terabyte of storage available in Redmond. At last check I was using 8.8 GB of that terabyte, mostly for files I need to share between various systems. The iDevices are all running iOS 10.3 or later, which means APFS; the Macs are running HFS+. Should MS blather about making those systems have NTFS, the sonic boom you hear will be me copying the contents of the OneDrive folder to iCloud or DropBox and then deleting OneDrive from Apple systems and disabling it in Win 10 'cause it seems that it's not possible to kill it there.

You will note that my Win 7 systems do NOT have OneDrive installed.

Plans are currently under way to get my very own private cloudy crap, at which time I'll say bye-bye to OneDrive, iCloud, and Dropbox.

[Fihart]

The usual abuse of language.

"Microsoft OneDrive wants to ensure users have the best possible sync experience on Windows, which is why OneDrive maintains the industry standard of support for NTFS."

How is not being able to sync, ensuring that users have the best possible sync experience ?

SD cards are Fat32 so they work with Mac and with cameras as well as Windows. It's a fact of life Microsoft have simply ignored.

They show their utter contempt -- and we increasingly return the compliment.

[theOtherJT]

Re: The usual abuse of language.

Yeah, variations on that particular bastard weasel phrase "To provide the best possible experience" always mean "We made this change for our own benefit and now we're going to pretend that we did it for yours". If they had an actual good technical reason, they'd have given it, not that empty marketing-speak stock phrase.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The usual abuse of language.

In case you haven't noticed, Microsoft LOVES to use weasel words in its PR/marketing speak.

'Best user experience', 'innovation', 'operational excellence', 'delivering value' etc.

[Craig 2]

"Microsoft discovered a warning message that should have existed was missing when a user attempted to store their OneDrive folder on a non-NTFS filesystem – which was immediately remedied. Nothing has changed in terms of official support and all OneDrive folders will continue to need to be located on a drive with the NTFS filesystem."

Hanlon's razor

[Anonymous Coward]

Hanlon's razor

In most cases, Microsoft is both malicious and stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Insiders - useful idiots for Microsoft who aren't even good at testing products

And when problems occur, Microsoft spams you with a barrage of constant updates.

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can see

It no longer really fits the description of one-drive..

Maybe one format instead?

Seems fairly dumb to me, especially as it excludes other M$ formats. What's so great about NTFS?

[anthonyhegedus]

The article mentions 'cloud backups' of drives. Shouldn't that be 'syncs'? It's not so much backed up as synced. I know that for many purposes it could be the same thing, but it's not exactly the same.

[ahd42]

nonedrive

For the few windows machines in my lan i have blocked that crap anyway. Also, good riddance...

[nilfs2]

Your fault!

It's your fault if you keep buying their crap, Microsoft products are well known for being unreliable.

[jelabarre59]

Fair & Balanced

As much as I love to harass MS for their evil behaviour, I suspect this is a technical issue. MS have just proven to be incapable of making OneDrive sync work on anything else, but are outright ashamed to admit they can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. So cue in the mealy-mouthed marketing-speak, because that's all their capable of doing.