Microsoft makes it harder to avoid OneDrive during new Windows 11 installs User data is being slurped into Microsoft's cloud via OneDrive folder backup without user permission. First reported by Neowin, a change in Windows 11's setup for new devices has resulted in OneDrive being fired up for automatic folder backup without first asking for authorization. It is difficult to avoid OneDrive when …
In more ways than one..
It's all a bit pushy on Microsoft's part. For users of the service, the OneDrive Folder Backup function is handy and allows customers to hop from device to device and access the same data with minimal effort.
What would be even handier is if the install asked users to nominate the server(s) or service they wanted OneDrive to backup to. Especially as there are multiple cloud storage players offering competing services, or people who roll their own servers. But it's not as if regulators have ever taken MS to task for bundling services, and making it very difficult for users to either opt out, or use alternatives.
for the times when ms used their monopoly to simply force revenue through and out of their oem contracts, and restricted their predations to direct competitors
i have to think that the corporate installs will not work this way, otherwise ms risks slow+low take up rates ...
Your assumption could not be more wrong. Corporations are embracing 365 and the entire Azure/Entra/Sharepoint/Dynamics eco-system at eye watering scales. With One Drive being the default user back-up system. Like the old dedicated server drive space or yore that users once used for their daily file storage.
I know, I've been doing the migrations. For billion dollar companies. And not one or two. But dozens over the last 5 years. 100s of thousands of users. Top companies in the word.
LOL! I loathe MS for more reasons than just their absolute 40 years of shite quality. Along with the arse fellating MS fanbois who are obvious shills.
Service Now is also earning my ire.
O365 is a real pain in the neck….
If you only ever need to use a single (365) account on a machine then it’s fine, as soon as you want a second account and want to be able to use Office (the downloaded local install version) from that account, without logging into 365… The only solution (*) is to purchase Office 2019/2021 (or 2024 when it is released), completely remove O365 and install (can’t coexist).
(*) Yes, I total get I could install LibreOffice or similar, however, if you are required to use M365… Perhaps the Eu need to require MS to make public all the M365 client/cloud APIs so tools like LibreOffice could seamlessly front end 365…
Oh God, please No. But have mercy on Roland6 for he knows not for what he wishes..
MacroSlurp would just *love* to slurp up all the data from LibreOffice users in the same way as it does Office users..
Agree, however, in the era of cloud we do need to rethink what “POSIX” compliance might mean and how we might promote the adoption of LibreOffice et al.
With an open API (and some encouragement for say the EU) there is the potential to start breaking up MS, and for others to provide (non MS) cloud services that use those APIs.
Remember the direction of travel is making any move away from MS (by a 365 subscribing organisation) an even bigger and riskier step…
Possibly Borkzilla could be forced to release a locally hostable 365 server along with said open API, which shall NOT require a MS account or connection to the mothership.. But it would be a cold day in Hell..
Then there's Office, which always tries to save to OneDrive by default
Oh good grief yes that's so bloody annoying, also goes at work with the share a link to the file on OneDrive rather than attach it in Outlook. That's against company policy for external emails. Plus why when I'm searching on Sharepoint for an updated version of a form I use regularly at work does it also search my blasted OneDrive? If I wanted to search OneDrive I would have done so in the first place.
I tried that on $CORP_LAPTOP and found after uninstalling that my user profile was b0rked as several profile directories were left inside a OneDrive directory and the Change where new content is saved settings didn't fix it. So yes, it will be a day of futzing around with the registry to get everything back where it was.
I have local source code trees on my laptop, there are too many small files and OneDrive hogs bandwidth while it shits itself trying and failing to synchronise them.
I have little need for OneDrive or backups as I edit checked out source code using an IDE and commit it to the repo, connect to remote servers, use Outlook with no local copy, or use Sharepoint.
In other words, OneDrive is pointless and causes problems, so out it went. I just signed out, uninstalled it normally, and then wasted time fixing the mess it left behind.
Thank you for caring corporate IT people.
>> It's the company's laptop, not yours
> Ah yes, much easier than moving the location where you store your source code to a local folder.
So he must obey only the company rules that make your point for you?
(You are referred to David132's story, below, for the pain of OneDrive and source code)
Firstly, we call them "directories". Secondly, they were local directories, as were all other directories on the PC, until OneDrive decided to stick its oar in and mess around with them. OneDrive does not offer true backup, rather synchronisation, OneDrive cannot synchronise a large amount of small files, and OneDrive is in the habit of moving files around. This makes it unsuitable for backing up and unsuitable for developers with source code on their PC.
I'm sure it's the easiest option for Corporate IT who just say we're all backed up now because we made sure everyone had OneDrive and tick the box but if your business or enterprise is relying on OneDrive for backup then it's doing it wrong.
with what users want, or Microsoft is. Either way, each new feature or direction MS takes makes me glad I abandoned Windows and switched to Linux long ago. MS seem determined to get their hands on your files and data by hook or by crook.
I guess that nowadays it is very much a case of what Microsoft wants being the direction of travel. More bucks to the bottom line is all that matters to them and screw the users, they are incidental.
It's the culmination of decades of hard work on their part - not to mention the various documented cases where they have been found to have broken the law as part of their plans.
It was ALWAYS the plan to integrate everything, preferably using proprietary and undocumented protocols. Basically it's all designed so that if you stick with an all-MS setup then it (sort of) just works. If you try and replace any of the parts, it won't work - either at all, or only with a lot of work and ongoing hassle.
That's why I think the EU is wrong in it's approach to Teams bundling. It's not just that it's bundled, it's that it's so interwoven with the rest of the ecosystem that it's impossible for anyone else to make an alternative.
What's needed is what Samba achieved with file/other network services. The outcome of that case was that MS were ordered by the courts to fully document the protocols and make thta available to anyone else on reasonable terms. The principle was that another project (e.g. Samba) could then create a competing server and allow users the choice of whether to use Windows Server or something else as their backend. Unfortunately that was too little, too late (MS had already killed all commercial competition in that space), and MS has moved on to the higher level of the stack and done exactly the same.
So while the EU may tell MS to unbundle Teams - it won't have the desired effect. Without that open API, big corporates will look at the alternatives and decide the lack of integration means the alternatives aren't viable - so just stick with Teams anyway.
Or you could just not allow anything from MS to pollute your machine?
At the moment, my work machine, remotely managed by a huge company and with all sorts of compliance requirements, won't allow me to see, from within Teams, a file I put into Teams, using a link within Teams. That's apparently because it's moved it somewhere more convenient to it - I really have no idea. Life is too short for all this pissing around with remote file storage and sharing; if I put a file somewhere, I'd like it to be there the next time I look, thanks. But MS just abstracts all that away, because, hey, files and hierarchical directory structures are so last century, dahlings.
You're not supposed to use "files", but a service, and that service is all you need: "Files" only confuse the users paying customers...
There is a phone/tablet OS doing this and everybody is happy. Why shouldn't Microsoft be allowed to do the same?.. *rolling eyes*.
I think I've related this one before, but...
A couple of years ago, when I was working at $BigCompany, I was doing development work in Visual Studio.
One day I'd been merrily coding, building, modifying... until I started a compile/build process and VS spat out so many error messages I couldn't begin to read them all.
Essentially, it couldn't find any of my source files, except the one currently in-memory in the editor.
After a few frantic minutes of thinking my SSD had corrupted itself... it turned out that the company's IT dept had chosen that moment, right in the middle of the working day, to switch on OneDrive on my PC, which meant that all my files had been moved - not copied, or linked - from $USERPROFILE to OneDrive's own preferred folder structure. Whilst being used.
So being the good, dutiful little office drone that I am not, I immediately moved them all back to their rightful locations, nuked OneDrive with prejudice, and continued coding.
(And yes, I'm sure some of you will be tut-tutting that I wantonly scorned IT's centralised backup scheme, but the fact that it just whisked my files away without even a prompt or a warning, did rather make me see red...)
To the surprise of no one M$ is driving nubs using the OS that the PC came with to a service that will give them food for CoPilot and a pay day later when the measly 5G of OneDrive space runs out.
Really, if you care about privacy at all you can't use M$ Windows.
The United States government is in the process of banning TikTok because personal information might be available to China (and because that media pushes specific content) -- yet Microsoft openly takes *all* content from a Windows 11 PC and copies it to their OneDrive (as well as pushing advertisements everywhere, from login screen to the Task Bar). However, Microsoft is totally trustworthy, so that's OK!
>With three fingers as it isn't my nation.
What's that got to with it? Unless you happen to be lucky enough to live in a country we call as an 'adversary' you are subject to US law to a greater or lesser degree. Its actually been like this for many decades but the application is neither even nor universal so many people don't realize it.
BTW -- An 'adversary' is merely a country that doesn't obey our 'rules based world order'. (We don't either but then we make the rules....)
I note that the reference to <Ctrl><Alt><Dlt> as "three finger salute" went over your head.
And ever since 2002-08-02 (when the The Hague Invasion Act) was passed, my country knows it is an adversary, even though we are still in NATO.
I find OneDrive functionality to be incredibly handy, especially when working across devices, so I think it's generally a great feature to be able to use. Other providers are, of course, available, which is why Microsoft is choosing to enable it by default, nudging people in the direction of eventually switching to a paid tier on OneDrive or M365 rather than, say, Google Drive.
That said, the migration of my main desktop to Linux Mint is proceeding apace. It has not been without hurdles, but I do anticipate it being ultimately successful.
I guess you mean "the only browser that would work was Firefox". First, is that an insurmountable issue? and second: I don't actually believe it. I've been using multiple different browsers on a (somewhat different) Ubuntu-derivative distro for literally years. Currently, I'm typing this into a window on Brave.
ended up giving up as only FireFox would work.
I've been running Chromium on Mint without a problem for years, not to mention a slew of other software. You clearly botched your installation (how is that even possible?), chances are you didn't want it to succeed from the beginning, didn't you...
Also, of course, when OneDrive and/or the MS Account system gets confused, working out how to fix it is an exercise in figuring out what "Login incomplete...Unknown error" means.
Call support, and they frequently don't know what it means either.
Something something don't make things more complex than absolutely necessary something
So thats 1 year of my photos being backed up.... and then the ads start..... along with "you would'nt want to lose your photos would you?... after all .. it would be a shame if something.............. happened to them...."
That only real surprise about m$ and onedrive is that they give you 5 gig free..... would have thought it would be 1 or even 1/2 a gig, just enough to lock you in and get you paying. forever.
Wheres the "give us all your money" icon?
My photo archive for this year so far is just short of 99Gb with one day occupying 40Gb.
Another all day shoot next wednesday. There will be a lot of 4K Video of diving Gannets in the archive.
Hey MS, now do you understand why I nuked One-Drive? Those images are mine as in I have the copyright, not YOU so FSCK off.
I've had the good luck of having to deal with several laptops with Win11 late last year, and the experience was not exactly as reported here.
First, installing without networking wasn't an option as I could before with Win10: it required a connected wifi. With the card disabled, the install couldn't continue.
Then, the need for an account depended on the brand. With an HP laptop, I had to use the shell trick described.
However, with a Lenovo, the trick didn't work - but then I noticed there simply was a button to skip it, that wasn't there on the HP. So did a Dell.
As for OneDrive itself, I have uninstalled, but it somehow crept back by itself at least once, via the magic of the Windows Store apparently.
I'm afraid late last year's experience is already out of date... I had a batch of Lenovo desktops to deal with the other week and none of the tricks I've seen (and previously used) worked. The "launch a shell and run msoobe" method now seems to result in a machine that sits there asking you to wait for ever more (certainly nothing happened even after several hours), forcing you to reboot and leaving you unable to log in. (The temporary user created for the install process has a randomly generated password I believe, and I didn't have ntpasswd on hand.)
The only option left to me was to restore to the factory image, which wasted an awful lot of time I didn't really have to spare.
So I can see the potential benefit in a small office network of backing up one's working files in the My Assorted Guff folder tree, so they become available should you log in elsewhere. However that is different to the thingy that somehow backs up your profile so when you log in elsewhere, exactly the same (ish) desktop appears as your own desktop and you don't have to move all the sodding menu bars around etc; I could do with some simple admin guidance on whatever admin tool MS wants me to use this week to achieve that, but alas it's clearly need to know.
I've also seen enterprise setups where the user's My Assorted Guff folders are not actually on the users machine but are squirrelled away to grand central for safe keeping. That's not entirely helpful when you're out somewhere that has really crap internet (and we're talking some posh offices here too). And is it my imagination or is 4G getting really congested in the UK?
The problem comes when I need said users to store files like common procedures, how-tos, check sheets etc in a shared area. Using SharePoint frightens the life out of them because the sharing permissions are so clunky. Need something better, Microsoft, but I doubt if we'll ever get it.
I hate to spoil your day, but....
OneDrive (And the file sharing functionality in Teams) is Sharepoint, albeit with a different front-end / UI as an intermediary. I share your pain, though.
To use a poor comparison, the admin interface for, Azure AD (Now Entra ID, at least until it's renamed again in a month or two) is a shining paragon of usability compared to the admin interface for OneDrive and Sharepoint. To call it a trash fire would be insulting to an actual trash fire.
The really nasty thing about this is that by default, Onedrive saves files to the cloud and leaves just a placeholder on the computer. To the user, it just looks the same, with the file downloading on demand - so a bit slower for most files.
There's nothing wrong with linking the documents, desktop and pictures to onedrive per se, if you want to, but this default behaviour basically means that the files you save on YOUR computer are not necessarily actually on YOUR computer at all!
This is typical of this monopolistic, bullying company. They have an agenda, and it isn't helping people with features they want. It's helping themselves to more cash. Sell more onedrive subs.
It's not just that, it's everything they do: they remove flexibility and choice, hemming the users into their way of working. It's evident in other things, like the way 365 email works, the way Microsoft Office installs, the way Teams works (or doesn't). I would understand if some of it was because of IT best practises, but it isn't. Take their dogged determination to implement 2fa for all 365 users. Good idea on the face of it. But you can just close the 2fa window and get a 'something went wrong' message and skip the whole thing!
And the atrocious way they insist on everyone having a Microsoft account is beyond reprehensible. In fact, the whole thing with business accounts and personal accounts being somehow both called Microsoft accounts is crass.
In a nutshell I'm of the opinion that Microsoft make largely shit software, which is never finished/finalised and they're disingenuous at best, crooked at worst.
"the files you save on YOUR computer are not necessarily actually on YOUR computer at all!"
This is why I eradicated OneDrive a few years ago. Working on documents in Word I was getting flabbergasted by which version am I working on here, and where is it located exactly? Bugger that for a game of soldiers. I'll keep my files local, then add to a dedicated cloud folder for backup only if and when I choose to.
> "the files you save on YOUR computer are not necessarily actually on YOUR computer at all!"
This aspect of Onedrive 365 that really gets me, I save a file to what is presented as my local This PC Documents folder, only to discover I can’t because Windows has decided to drop the connection to the cloud, so I have to wait for Onedrive to re-establish the cloud connection so I can save my work to what should be a local folder that is simply asynchronously replicated to the cloud. The other joke is opening a “local file” only to discover it is actually o a shared drive and thus Office has opened it in read only mode…
Currently, the Public Documents folder is getting a lot of use, as it is (currently) really on the local ha drive..
The insights of Gordon Welchman from Bletchley Park days are still classified, some of them at least. He worked on what would now be called metadata analysis, ie without any view of message content. An awful lot of valuable information can be gleaned from this, the full extent is still secret.
If I were a corporate IT bod, I'd be wary of putting this into the hands of others, from the above argument, and the fact that it "ranks" particular documents, communications, persons, as the most important. This is the key to understanding the technical, scientific and political heirarchy of an organisation - and a huge ready-prepared bounty for any "bad players".
This much is indisputable.
Onto slightly more conspiratorial matters, as per the title, what is the US legal status of information that does not include direct transcripts or disclosures?
Are cloud-storage providers, or database-management tools, allowed to share this metadata information with whatever partners they choose? Similarly, if the authorities wanted visibility, what would be the legal status? - It's not quite warrantless interception, definitely illegal, as arguably no "confidential " information - such as might be encrypted - has been disclosed. I don't know, perhaps caution rather than suspicion is needed.
Ultimately, what are the benefits to a company of the "cloud" storage, versus a backed-up server? I've always liked the fact that appropriate related documents are in the same sub-directory of the project, on the F:\ drive, and they stay there, to be browsed whenever, forever. To find the correct unique thread in Teams or whatever, as the only way back to a remembered document, is a huge impediment - and utterly unavailable for new members. And for anyone, if you decline to renew your license.
I don't understand why this is being claimed as something new. Windows 11 has always automatically turned on OneDrive backups when I've installed it or set up an OEM machine, and I'm certain that Windows 10 has done the same thing for years (perhaps not in the initial release but I can't recall). At no point do I remember being given an option to NOT enable it, so why are these reports acting like they've changed something?
I don't recall ever having a prompt for that during setup.
Well, there's something to be said for doing it that way, but it's really an issue with the naming of the feature. It's not "backups", which are by definition machine-specific; it's "folder redirection using the cloud" which is not machine-specific. You wouldn't want it keeping a copy of those files on every device, so that you could potentially end up with different versions that might all contain valid data, when they're supposed to just be a centralized storage location of a single version, and there is no way for the system to differentiate between files that should remain in the cloud for other machines to access and which files should remain on that particular machine. (Compare to Google Drive's way of doing it, where you can select the folders to sync and they are all stored separately for each machine, and only the global Google Drive mapped drive storage is combined.) Removing the files gives you the option to transfer them OUT of the cloud and onto the individual machine so that there is only one copy. Unfortunately that could mean needing to download a huge amount of data, but OneDrive isn't supposed to be keeping all that data cached locally anyway, is it?
It's now been 3 years or more since I touched real folder redirection on a domain-joined PC and had to turn it off so I can't recall for sure, but I believe when you turn that off it actually transfers all the data OUT of the server storage and back to the local folders for the first machine you log into that applies the new policy where it's turned off. So that's the opposite of OneDrive and would result in a single machine having all your data and the others having nothing.
The day I realized how sneaky Microsoft is at grabbing your data — all in the name of saving hard disk space. Oh really? Well, I went ahead and bought some shares. Now they’re up by 200%. Shame on me, I know. But hey, it's the second-best pain relief after having to spend my work life with the Microsoft overlords.. No brainer on what's best.
Given the upload speed of my snail-band connexion, thank you, EE/BT, backing up anything outside my network would take several lifetimes, or an act of some very strong deity. I shall not be falling into the trap, in spite of the MS stupid plague spot suggestion.
As an additional comment. I bought a Western Digital EX4100 NAS and populated it with some unused 4TB HDD, since upgraded to 4 x 6TB HDD. Onedrive was whacked years ago although the default "quick access" links like to still point to onedrive. No mictosoft account, not mictosoft spyware, no mictosoft theft of data. None of my three pcs use onedrive and if I want to access anything on the NAS I just log into it from wherever I happen to be. Perfect security and safety? Not until 2048 bit encryption is the default.
When Microsoft calls "cloud storage" backup, I think of Apple's TimeMachine.
You know, TimeMachine. Point it at a drive somewhere, local or network, and you have incremental backups. I keep waiting for Microsoft to have, well, any backup solution at all.
Of course, Apple hates that they have all that nice MacOS stuff and is trying as hard as possible to kill it. Sign of the times I guess.
Actually, if OneDrive is just a different face on Sharepoint (which I loath as a "poor" implementation of a good idea), then everything you do will be kept - all version you save, all versions your applicationsprogrammes auto-save, - are all kept until the version retention setting is reached. And even then, I think they go into the site "bin" until the system needs to delete them to recover some space. But you probably can't see these without going into the OneDrive interface (i.e. not the File Explorer).
It seems slightly suspicious that they want a copy of everybody’s data.
Sure, the data, once it is copied over, is safely secured behind impervious encryption.
What if they figured out a way to make a “summary” of the data in the few microseconds between when the data is transmitted and when it is encrypted. Maybe the encryption algorithm takes one input stream and creates two outputs: one is the encrypted data, and the other is a “bias” data. The bias stream can’t be used to recreate the original copy, but it might carry the “gist” of it.
Then, you feed all these bias streams from all of Microsoft’s “valued” customers to one big whopper of an AI processor, which, inexplicably, can suddenly make surprisingly accurate predictions about such things as the stock markets, consumer trends, voter preferences, etc.
I have long suspected Google of doing something similar with its “gmail“ service. Everybody in the world gets free email, and Google gets an opportunity to monitor all of the communications between everybody. Perhaps not a perfect copy, perhaps a “bias” stream is enough to suddenly be able to make remarkably accurate predictions about the future.
As I just posted in the "Windows: Insecure by design" story, I had a customer be unable to backup to her external USB disk because OneDrive intercepted the drive to drive copy operation, see that there wasn't enough space on OneDrive for the file, and abort the disk operation.
Had she called MS for support, I'm sure they'd have told her she had to purchase 2TB of cloud storage to be allowed to use her local hard disk. Fortunately, she called me instead, and I defanged her Windows set so that she didn't have to go through Microsoft servers to make a local backup.
During this investigation, we discovered that 5GB of her proprietary customer data was in the cloud on OneDrive, without her knowledge or consent.
When I played with setting up Linux last year, I tried almost a dozen distros before ultimately deciding on Mint. One of the marked differences between Linux and Windows is that while you still have to configure your desktop environment to suit you, with Linux, you're customizing the interface, not trying to defeat it.
Linux isn't perfect, by any means. In Mint, you still have to enable the firewall which is disabled by default. But you don't have to go though hoops to not associate your desktop computer with an internet account, you don't have to run a "decrappifier" or hunt through dozens of configuration screens to disable telemetry, and you don't have reconfigure your machine after every operating system update (which in Windows, can be weekly) because the update has reset all of the privacy settings and file associations to what Microsoft wants them to be, not what you set (and reset, and reset, and reset) them to be.
I'm running a Windows 11 machine set up with a local account that (so far) does NOT have OneDrive activated for that account. The main Administrator account has a Microsoft log-in, but it is only used for software maintenance and no work requiring file storage and retrieval is ever done with it.
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