Microsoft quietly changed how folder backup works in the OneDrive app on Windows 11. Now, the OS enables it by default during the initial setup without asking the user for permission.
I did that and it was a mess, with warnings about being unable to backup that I couldn’t get rid of. I had to reinstall to try to turn off syncing, then remove again. But it’s so integrated that my desktop is still under a OneDrive subfolder and it’s still referenced in various places.
Is there a guide to completely removing this from Windows 11 cleanly?
You can disable so-called essential components and I believe it ships without almost any of the bloat. So essentially you could just take one drive out, or not have it in the first place. Or at least that’s my hope
Designed to fill the 5gb immediately so you’re going to buy more cloud space immediately
When I had an iPhone, there was an annoying red dot on the settings icon “warning, you didn’t enable cloud backups for photos”, and if you enabled it become an annoying red dot “warning you ran out of iCloud space”
It’s not an Apple fanboy but imo it’s a lot more transparent on their side. There’s a switch for each and every service to use iCloud or not in the settings. Services don’t just re-enable their usage of iCloud after some random update and most importantly, they don’t just re-install apps you previously deleted. Or bloatware.
Oh no, an annoying red dot. Microsoft are straight up hoovering up users data into the cloud by automatically enabling syncing. These two things are not even close to the same.
it’s a dark pattern deliberately chosen to let people get annoyed and pay for icloud. On windows people instead will accidentally fill their onedrive account and that’s it. They won’t even know that they’re using it. It might send some scary emails like “your cloud backup is full!!!11 you gonna lose everything!!111” but those go directly in spam. Error messages in windows for regular users appear like “����� �������� �����������” - their eyes don’t have the right encoding to understand the message, so they just click OK and dismiss it. Instead, the red dot is prominent in the home screen of every iphone and bother also those that don’t read the error messages…
Wow. I genuinely can’t believe people are upvoting you for this. Like yeah, I super agree it’s a dark pattern. Stealing people’s data is WAY worse though, uploading potentially sensitive photos or documents to their cloud with no user input. But according to you that’s fine because it’s less obtrusive and annoying? Yeesh I’m glad I don’t have your priorities.
Edit: Like, have you seen most people’s home screens? They’ll have a dozen other “red dots” and it becomes part of the background. In the same way as you talk about with Windows errors. Here’s mine:
Oh noooo, a red dot on the Settings app…with all the other red dots…
Yes. I completely agree that there should be. However the other poster’s claim that it makes Apple just as bad as Microsoft turning a syncing feature on without user consent is ludicrous imo. That just feels like giving them a free pass on what is, I believe, an as before unseen escalation in the erosion of user privacy by large corporations.
For me it was annoying enough to switch to android. I really felt like I had to use iCloud, forced through my throat. I have ocd and a red dot means “I need to open this app immediately RIGHT NOW to clear it” - and then your can’t clear it until you subscribe
There’s always the option to store things locally. You want to get fancy, you can set up a NAS for remote access.
Saying “isn’t X also doing Y” implies the behaviour itself isn’t the problem, when it is. Doesn’t matter who’s using dark patterns for rent-seeking; it matters that we’ve normalized it.
Actually, my father in law just lost 3 months of work yesterday because he synced his documents folder that had an old copy of his book on OneDrive. None of the cached files had his new stuff. Maybe if OneDrive was made well, it would prevent data loss.
I think that it’s quite bad if Microsoft puts peoples family photos on their servers without the user realizing it. That’s not a niche privacy nerd sentiment, I think that a lot of people would find that creepy. Having the option easily available can be really good for a lot of non-techy people but it should be very clear what stays on your computer and what doesn’t, and how to keep something private if you want to, which I’m not sure that it is if Microsoft quietly backs up Documents, Pictures etc.
Right, I recall news from years ago where a bunch of celebrities’ very private photos backed up to iCloud were leaked. They may or may not have known they uploaded those to iCloud, I dunno. But imagine what’s up there if you don’t realize you’re doing a backup. Not just photos, but like scanned documents with vulnerable information. And all that personal info in a centralized server is a big ol honeypot for a malicious actor.
It’s not hard to see why this is a vulnerability, is what I’m getting at.
Except it won’t be their most important data. Either their very first files from their desktop (up to 5 GB), or random 5 GB files (no idea which). Once it’s filled quickly, it will start nagging about buying more storage.
The problem is that they are not actively asking permission.
They are technically legally asking permission through the EULA, but nobody reads these.
Apple do this differently, they require the user to opt in for each of their services, and except for a pitiful amount of storage, the user has to pay for a useful amount of storage. This makes the user the customer, instead of the product.
They could make it easier to roll-your-own “cloud” storage by NAS, but I assume that it isn’t worth their effort.
Counterpoint: My sibling had their goddamn desktop ransomewared by this thing when they dared to uninstall it. It isn’t privacy nerd sensabilities, Windows now behaves like malware under certain opaque conditions and at unpredictable intervals. This was four years ago on Win 10. How great do you think non savvy people are about clicking things they don’t understand anyway and essentially springing a trap?
The bottom has dropped out of the OEM software licence market. Microsoft have to find a different way of making money.
Their loss-leading hardware sales have not borne fruit so they are getting desperate.
All they have left is services, which means that the only way the can actually make money is selling out their customers private information.
Remember what that landscape looked like. The only major players we know today that existed then are Microsoft and Apple, and Apple had just been bailed out by MS to get in front of antitrust issues. Amazon existed as a bookstore, Google was not around yet, Facebook would still be several years out … MySpace wasn’t yet around. AOL was still a behemoth. Adobe sold perpetual licenses.
Google was the first example I thought of, because they were founded in 1998, solidly before the dotcom crash. They survived because they hoarded data.
My point was that every company going into the bubble thought they had a product they could monetize, but virtually all of them failed in favor of just hoarding everyone’s data. Amazon and eBay were competing for ecomerce supremacy, but now even they are just privacy violators for various reasons (amazon via AWS and Alexa, eBay in the interest of detecting malicious account behaviour).
MySpace is an example of another unsustainable social media model in the vein of many dotcom era services. They died out as soon as Facebook realized they could hoard everyone’s data.
All roads lead to privacy nightmares. It’s the fossil fuel of the internet, and enshitification is the climate change.
I could swear Google wasn’t broadly a thing yet. The startup I worked at in 1999 had an elevator pitch for how we “could be the next Yahoo.” Not a great thing to aspire to in retrospect, but Google wasn’t on our radar.
They were there and they were superior to the alternatives almost out of the gate. I was working for a video game company at the time and me and the rest of the IT dept made the switch almost immediately because the results were clearly superior. Made me an advocate for them for years, probably far beyond where I should have given up. I am not sure which product cancellation finally changed my mind on them. Probably it was around the mess of Google Talk/Chat/Hangouts mess of apps.
You’re right, they weren’t a “household name” yet. But they were probably more than a little worried about surviving at the time. Turns out they picked the winning strategy.
Like every time windows is mentioned the Linux users come out to try to convert people. You guys are so fucking annoying. Just make a post about Linux. We dont want your shit ass OS. We need one which actually runs the software we use.
Guess the posts are good to block these annoying Linuxers
Please try not to escalate comment threads that are already tense. Remember to be(e) nice. I think think it is understandable that someone might be frustrated with the regular, low effort responses to practically any mention of Windows or a number of other topics.
It’s not helpful because it’s not discussing content but attacking a person’s character. This leads to emotions running high rather than letting your reasoning win the discussion.
No worries. I don’t think anybody in the comments here have crossed any lines yet; I’m just trying to defuse things before they get to that point. I’m finding that !technology is one of the communities where we’re most likely to have to lock threads or remove comments, other than maybe !politics, and I’m trying to be more proactive about reminding folks to deescalate when things get tense.
This is one of the things I love about the Lemmy community.
No one wants to argue, every one can be passionate about their opinions, but still respect other people’s passion.
When there’s a post about privacy issues, expect alternatives with more privacy be mentioned. It’s just that there are so many moments that big corporations violate user’s privacy nowadays, so that’s why you see it that often.
Hey, I totally get your frustration here, but in the future please keep in mind the primary ethos on Beehaw and try to be nice in your comments here. I sympathize with how irritating the constant barrage of “just install arch” as if that’s a simple fix for every problem, and I think it would be valuable for users on this forum to think about this before they comment, but let’s try to stay respectful and kind to other users. Thanks!
I used Linux back in the 90s as my primary OS. They were simpler times. Since then I have used BeOS, various versions of Windows and (primarily) MacOS.
I am seriously thinking of going over to Linux as my primary OS because of all the TechBro “AI” bullshit that Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and Google are trying to ram down our throats.
I was in court the other day and it turns out that while they send us the evidence videos encrypted (and never give us the right password), the government’s lawyer had it all on onedrive 🫠
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Not surprised.
Until Microsoft takes that option away as well…
Or just reinstalls it in the next update.
They never reinstalled OneDrive after an update… yet
(I hate how I have to uninstall useless shit after updates)
I did that and it was a mess, with warnings about being unable to backup that I couldn’t get rid of. I had to reinstall to try to turn off syncing, then remove again. But it’s so integrated that my desktop is still under a OneDrive subfolder and it’s still referenced in various places.
Is there a guide to completely removing this from Windows 11 cleanly?
It’s ltsc an option for 11 like it was for 10?
No idea but, after a quick search to learn what this is, I’m not sure how it would help were it to be an option.
You can disable so-called essential components and I believe it ships without almost any of the bloat. So essentially you could just take one drive out, or not have it in the first place. Or at least that’s my hope
Yeah, it’s also not “just” if it’s one of what feels like hundreds of steps now to make the OS somewhat usable.
You can’t make this shit up
Isn’t apple doing the same?
Designed to fill the 5gb immediately so you’re going to buy more cloud space immediately
When I had an iPhone, there was an annoying red dot on the settings icon “warning, you didn’t enable cloud backups for photos”, and if you enabled it become an annoying red dot “warning you ran out of iCloud space”
It’s not an Apple fanboy but imo it’s a lot more transparent on their side. There’s a switch for each and every service to use iCloud or not in the settings. Services don’t just re-enable their usage of iCloud after some random update and most importantly, they don’t just re-install apps you previously deleted. Or bloatware.
Yes, it doesn’t get re enabled but I totally hate that annoying red dot on settings if you don’t set iCloud
That red dot should disappear if you disable iCloud (yes, it is different from not setting it up… it is not good, but you can get rid of it)
Oh no, an annoying red dot. Microsoft are straight up hoovering up users data into the cloud by automatically enabling syncing. These two things are not even close to the same.
it’s a dark pattern deliberately chosen to let people get annoyed and pay for icloud. On windows people instead will accidentally fill their onedrive account and that’s it. They won’t even know that they’re using it. It might send some scary emails like “your cloud backup is full!!!11 you gonna lose everything!!111” but those go directly in spam. Error messages in windows for regular users appear like “����� �������� �����������” - their eyes don’t have the right encoding to understand the message, so they just click OK and dismiss it. Instead, the red dot is prominent in the home screen of every iphone and bother also those that don’t read the error messages…
Wow. I genuinely can’t believe people are upvoting you for this. Like yeah, I super agree it’s a dark pattern. Stealing people’s data is WAY worse though, uploading potentially sensitive photos or documents to their cloud with no user input. But according to you that’s fine because it’s less obtrusive and annoying? Yeesh I’m glad I don’t have your priorities.
Edit: Like, have you seen most people’s home screens? They’ll have a dozen other “red dots” and it becomes part of the background. In the same way as you talk about with Windows errors. Here’s mine:
Oh noooo, a red dot on the Settings app…with all the other red dots…
There should be an option to say “I’ve read it and I decided against it” that makes the dot disappear.
Yes. I completely agree that there should be. However the other poster’s claim that it makes Apple just as bad as Microsoft turning a syncing feature on without user consent is ludicrous imo. That just feels like giving them a free pass on what is, I believe, an as before unseen escalation in the erosion of user privacy by large corporations.
For me it was annoying enough to switch to android. I really felt like I had to use iCloud, forced through my throat. I have ocd and a red dot means “I need to open this app immediately RIGHT NOW to clear it” - and then your can’t clear it until you subscribe
I really like Jobs-era Apple and hate M$, but didn’t feel the urge to defend A this time.
There’s always the option to store things locally. You want to get fancy, you can set up a NAS for remote access.
Saying “isn’t X also doing Y” implies the behaviour itself isn’t the problem, when it is. Doesn’t matter who’s using dark patterns for rent-seeking; it matters that we’ve normalized it.
devil’s advocate: this will save the vast majority of user (which are completely tech illiterate) from loosing their most important data
lets be real, none of them will use a private or foss backup solution any time soon.
I’d rather not they loose their important family photos for that oh so horrible crime of offending my privacy nerd sensibilities
Actually, my father in law just lost 3 months of work yesterday because he synced his documents folder that had an old copy of his book on OneDrive. None of the cached files had his new stuff. Maybe if OneDrive was made well, it would prevent data loss.
I think that it’s quite bad if Microsoft puts peoples family photos on their servers without the user realizing it. That’s not a niche privacy nerd sentiment, I think that a lot of people would find that creepy. Having the option easily available can be really good for a lot of non-techy people but it should be very clear what stays on your computer and what doesn’t, and how to keep something private if you want to, which I’m not sure that it is if Microsoft quietly backs up Documents, Pictures etc.
Right, I recall news from years ago where a bunch of celebrities’ very private photos backed up to iCloud were leaked. They may or may not have known they uploaded those to iCloud, I dunno. But imagine what’s up there if you don’t realize you’re doing a backup. Not just photos, but like scanned documents with vulnerable information. And all that personal info in a centralized server is a big ol honeypot for a malicious actor.
It’s not hard to see why this is a vulnerability, is what I’m getting at.
deleted by creator
Except it won’t be their most important data. Either their very first files from their desktop (up to 5 GB), or random 5 GB files (no idea which). Once it’s filled quickly, it will start nagging about buying more storage.
I’m not confident my tax documents aren’t saved to my dektop.
I usually air gap onto an external disk, but I’ve been busy recently.
The problem is that they are not actively asking permission.
They are technically legally asking permission through the EULA, but nobody reads these.
Apple do this differently, they require the user to opt in for each of their services, and except for a pitiful amount of storage, the user has to pay for a useful amount of storage. This makes the user the customer, instead of the product. They could make it easier to roll-your-own “cloud” storage by NAS, but I assume that it isn’t worth their effort.
Counterpoint: My sibling had their goddamn desktop ransomewared by this thing when they dared to uninstall it. It isn’t privacy nerd sensabilities, Windows now behaves like malware under certain opaque conditions and at unpredictable intervals. This was four years ago on Win 10. How great do you think non savvy people are about clicking things they don’t understand anyway and essentially springing a trap?
Exactly the same path Recall will take. Install Linux Mint, folks…
Anti Commercial-AI license
The bottom has dropped out of the OEM software licence market. Microsoft have to find a different way of making money. Their loss-leading hardware sales have not borne fruit so they are getting desperate.
All they have left is services, which means that the only way the can actually make money is selling out their customers private information.
That describes the business model of basically every internet company that survived the dotcom bubble.
Remember what that landscape looked like. The only major players we know today that existed then are Microsoft and Apple, and Apple had just been bailed out by MS to get in front of antitrust issues. Amazon existed as a bookstore, Google was not around yet, Facebook would still be several years out … MySpace wasn’t yet around. AOL was still a behemoth. Adobe sold perpetual licenses.
This is a far more recent development.
Google was the first example I thought of, because they were founded in 1998, solidly before the dotcom crash. They survived because they hoarded data.
My point was that every company going into the bubble thought they had a product they could monetize, but virtually all of them failed in favor of just hoarding everyone’s data. Amazon and eBay were competing for ecomerce supremacy, but now even they are just privacy violators for various reasons (amazon via AWS and Alexa, eBay in the interest of detecting malicious account behaviour).
MySpace is an example of another unsustainable social media model in the vein of many dotcom era services. They died out as soon as Facebook realized they could hoard everyone’s data.
All roads lead to privacy nightmares. It’s the fossil fuel of the internet, and enshitification is the climate change.
I could swear Google wasn’t broadly a thing yet. The startup I worked at in 1999 had an elevator pitch for how we “could be the next Yahoo.” Not a great thing to aspire to in retrospect, but Google wasn’t on our radar.
They were there and they were superior to the alternatives almost out of the gate. I was working for a video game company at the time and me and the rest of the IT dept made the switch almost immediately because the results were clearly superior. Made me an advocate for them for years, probably far beyond where I should have given up. I am not sure which product cancellation finally changed my mind on them. Probably it was around the mess of Google Talk/Chat/Hangouts mess of apps.
You’re right, they weren’t a “household name” yet. But they were probably more than a little worried about surviving at the time. Turns out they picked the winning strategy.
Every. Single. Post.
Like every time windows is mentioned the Linux users come out to try to convert people. You guys are so fucking annoying. Just make a post about Linux. We dont want your shit ass OS. We need one which actually runs the software we use. Guess the posts are good to block these annoying Linuxers
deleted by creator
Please try not to escalate comment threads that are already tense. Remember to be(e) nice. I think think it is understandable that someone might be frustrated with the regular, low effort responses to practically any mention of Windows or a number of other topics.
deleted by creator
It’s not helpful because it’s not discussing content but attacking a person’s character. This leads to emotions running high rather than letting your reasoning win the discussion.
No worries. I don’t think anybody in the comments here have crossed any lines yet; I’m just trying to defuse things before they get to that point. I’m finding that !technology is one of the communities where we’re most likely to have to lock threads or remove comments, other than maybe !politics, and I’m trying to be more proactive about reminding folks to deescalate when things get tense.
This is one of the things I love about the Lemmy community. No one wants to argue, every one can be passionate about their opinions, but still respect other people’s passion.
When there’s a post about privacy issues, expect alternatives with more privacy be mentioned. It’s just that there are so many moments that big corporations violate user’s privacy nowadays, so that’s why you see it that often.
Fine! You keep using windows, we will keep using our shit ass OS.
Hey, I totally get your frustration here, but in the future please keep in mind the primary ethos on Beehaw and try to be nice in your comments here. I sympathize with how irritating the constant barrage of “just install arch” as if that’s a simple fix for every problem, and I think it would be valuable for users on this forum to think about this before they comment, but let’s try to stay respectful and kind to other users. Thanks!
You will submit! Join the ranks of the less surveilled, my friend.
Or give your data to Microsoft for free, your choice.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I used Linux back in the 90s as my primary OS. They were simpler times. Since then I have used BeOS, various versions of Windows and (primarily) MacOS.
I am seriously thinking of going over to Linux as my primary OS because of all the TechBro “AI” bullshit that Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and Google are trying to ram down our throats.
Or better, a proper distro
Sure, let’s propose Arch to absolute linux newbies. That’ll go over splendidly.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Or you can be sane, and use Bazzite
Did I?
Obligatory eye-roll.
Do you use Arch by any chance?
PS. Two of my machines run Endeavour OS, the other MX XFCE ;-)
No, last I used Arch must have been over a decade ago
Mint is a good distro. Wtf you saying?
Mint is an awesome distro. LMDE is my goto because it is simple and works. What makes you think otherwise?
Let’s not start this kind of low-effort distro warring in the comments on Beehaw, please.
… they said Archly.
That joke was…Mint?
Please do not resist, it’s for your own safety.
Yep, lost 3 months of work yesterday because OneDrive erased it.
Isn’t the entire point of the newer versions of Windows just to force the engagement with applications you normally wouldn’t use?
Doesn’t Windows 10 already do that? I could never get the freaking thing to leave my files behind and disable itself.
Windows 10 LTSC for the win if you have software you can’t yet abandon.
As a workaround with the default directory fuckery, I always just made new ones.
Mmm linux sounding so good lately
Pretty sure later updates for Windows 10 started doing this too, or at least it did on my PC.
Had to completely uninstall OneDrive to get it to stop - which Microsoft sure do make quite difficult to do.
I was in court the other day and it turns out that while they send us the evidence videos encrypted (and never give us the right password), the government’s lawyer had it all on onedrive 🫠
I thought it already did that
I already have one drive. It’s installed in my PC. Why would I need another?