New year, new OS: OneDrive support axed for old versions of Windows from 1 Jan 2022 Microsoft has reminded everyone that OneDrive is for the chop in Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 by the end of the year. The warning applies to personal users – support for business users "will be aligned with the Windows support lifecycle." Destined for the axe is the personal version of the desktop application responsible for …
They said its in line with the Windows support cycle, but then go an kill support of Onedrive software for Windows 8.1 a year before the EOL of the OS.
I very much doubt there is anything that MS would actually need to do to keep support for Windows 8.1 for another year, since apart from some UI tweaks there isn't much changed underneath the hood between Windows 8.1, 10 and 11
Just seems like MS trying to push users to upgrade from 8.1 before support ends as they don't get all that lovely telemetry from Windows 8.1 users.
It would be neat if Microsoft actually made versions of Onedrive that actually fucking synced properly even on the latest versions of MacOS and Windows! How many times have I had to deal with 'Uploading 0KB of 125KB' that just sits there and does absolutely sod-all until it's reset or rebooted or deleted and reinstalled??!!
Or when a sync problem occurs (a daily feature), it just sits there and stops syncing anything at all, because of one clash?
Or clashes happening for no reason because two people dare to open the same file - a features that's *supposed* to work?
Or the onedrive client just exits and nothing syncs for weeks? The end-user will say "but I restart it every day" when what they mean is they shut the PC down and turn it on again. Because of Microsoft's "fast start" bollocks, it doesn't REALLY shut down properly. And things that have stopped working, like Onedrive, just stay broken. Actually that's a whole other rant.
Since I was always conscious of my electricity use by things I'd supposedly turned off^, I began to use power strips with a physical on/off button. Plug the computer into the power strip, tell the computer to shut down, wait for the confirmation chime, then flip the power strip switch to off. The only way I could be any more sure is if I physicly unplugged the power strip entirely.
^:Thanks to my BioDad that constantly harped on us kids if we so much as left a room & left a light on behind us. "But I'm just going to the WC, dad, I'll be right back." Too bad, turn it off! *Sigh*
Unfortunately that won't make any difference. When you shut down a Windows PC, it does actually turn the power off, but it doesn't shut down the OS fully - it does a hibernate. Actually it logs out the current user and then does a hibernate, then turns off. So the PC is just using a watt or two (someone will correct me) being on 'standby'.
Turning it off at the power strip will not make any difference to the shutdown state of the PC. When you turn it back on, whether it's been off on standby, or powered off at the strip, it'll restore the hibernated session, along with all the windows problems that haven't been fixed because the OS hasn't been restarted. This is called 'fast start' because the process of restoring the hibernate session is faster than starting up normally. Although these days, with SSDs and faster PCs, there's little if any difference. The 'fast start' system actually causes more problems than it fixes: slightly faster boot-up, on older PCs at the expense of system problems that never get resolved until the next update which requires a restart.
On a separate note, turning your PC off at the mains causing another problem: the small battery in the PC that maintains the system time depletes faster. It'll last years less if the PC is powered off, say, 60% of the time.
On an even more separate note, my dad was like that too - turning the landing light off before I got to the top of the stairs because it appeared to be on for no reason :-)
"On a separate note, turning your PC off at the mains causing another problem: "
IIRC the most likely time for a piece of electrical/electronic equipment to break is at power up. Our company once instigated a "power off" policy for video terminals. Within a month it was rescinded as so many were out-of-service awaiting repair.
EU rules have set "stand by" power for electronic equipment to be about 2w - with a further reduction being proposed.
I used a mechanical mains timer to switch off some house electronics at night. I discovered that the timer took more power than the quiescent devices.
Yeah, I know, I know. Anything Apple must be bad (although I suspect you know that such a black and white view is imbecilic or you wouldn’t have posted as Anonymous Coward)
It is worth noting though that if you want to keep that sweet sweet file sync action going on older versions of Windows, iCloud Drive still works with Windows 7.
Just because you don’t have any Apple hardware doesn’t mean that you can’t use (enjoy might be pushing it) Apple products.
The article gets the dates wrong.
The actual message is from start of next year in line with the support of the OS: only Win8 loses support in Jan 2022 (as Win 8 iwent EoL Jan 2016);. Win7 & 8.1 continue until 2023-01-23.
That will have been a decade for Windows 7: how much support to you expect to get without further payment?
People used to maintain backups at home, nowadays everything's in the cloud and streaming so home storage had pretty much disappeared. Does this "update" mean that home storage might return? I have used Google Backup and Sync and OneDrive for years and now they are both being updowngraded so I'm going to look into having my own cloud storage box - I plan to quit all of the cloud data-grabbers.
Cloud storage box?
Take an old 'ish PC , mine is about 2010'ish , has intel raid thingy on boot up(was'nt used), however 4 500 gig sata drives later + 1 300 gig non raid HDD for booting , add linux mint and a bit of samba magic
I got myself a decent storage box....... and yeah I could upgrade it to 2TB drives.. but for what I store.... it aint worth it.
(if I could be bothered, make it a headless server I can remote into .. but then its used as youtube player/guitar amp/source game server as well.. so the moniter and speakers stay )
do you really want your mp3 collection to be stored on someone else's server, subject to THEIR whims?
just thought I'd point that out. I have to wonder how much marketing information can be gleaned from someone's preferences in music... or whether the content's owner has legit copies or not, etc.
[de-duplication algorithms might look at binary mismatches as "possible copyright infringement" - just sayin']
ZFS is pretty cool, yeah. I boot into ZFS on my workstations for 3-4 years now.
Periodic 'zpool scrub' spotted a hard drive going bad before any real data loss. It's a real butt-saver.
(it's used on FreeNAS as well, as I recall)
[And last I checked OneDrive does not work for FreeBSD or Linux anyway]
For most consumers they are not "backups" but rather a synchronised copy.
The local data gets deleted or duffed up, then so is the remote copy.
This is one of the huge issues I have with all the cloud sync stuff. None of it is a true backup, it is merely an additional copy (or in many cases, the only copy) on someone else's hardware.
Shirley you lot have remote ("off campus") personal file servers? Why trust other people for remote data storage when you can park an old Pentium box of arbitrary capacity and encryption of choice on your Great Aunt Ruth's DSL line in Duluth?[0] Has worked for me since DSL became available in Duluth ...
Offer to pay for her DSL (she'll probably decline), and promise to only use the bandwidth once per day in the wee hours Duluth time so you don't interrupt her viewing of cute cat videos. Offer to similarly backup her data (and cute cat pics) onto your home equipment. Automating both to happen at 3AM Duluth time should be trivial. Use the encryption method of your choice.
You can invite other friends relatives into your "circle of archive protection". Once you've got yours and the Great Aunt's automated, adding a few more archive sites is trivial, as is adding redundant backup sites. The first time it's needed, by any any one of them, for any reason, the minimal effort will have been worth it. (For example, a friend who lost everything in the Tubbs fire a couple years ago still has copies of all his important documents, email, personal pictures and home videos. Priceless, that.)
[0] Insert other favorite elderly relative+city+connection method to meet your needs. An old, low power draw, headless laptop is ideal for this kind of thing. I run a very minimalistic BSD on mine, YMMV.
might be even cheaper to get a rent-a-server with ssh access. Then use scp or sftp to copy things onto it, and maybe the web server to download it (if you want it public anyway).
DSL costs quite a bit more than a rent-a-server last I checked. And the bandwidth would be better.
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