Backup - OneDrive Issues

pparks1 said:

... it has taken more of a full permanent solution by whacking the local files entirely...

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Completely and unfathomably unethical!

It should read:

andrew129260 said:

I think the last couple points explain very easily why onedrive is confusing lol.

Google drive backup does a better job and is easier to understand.

Google Drive: Share Files Online with Secure Cloud Storage | Google Workspace

Learn about Google Drive’s file sharing platform that provides a personal, secure cloud storage option to share content with other users.

www.google.com

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I used to be a Dropbox user and I really liked it. It allowed me to easily share things with my wife that we could both get from our computers and our phones. 2 features I really liked was that I could Throttle my bandwidth and limit what Dropbox could use, and I liked that when transferring from PC to PC in the house, it could handle that transfer on the LAN only, and not send from PC1 to cloud, and then download from cloud to PC2.

What caused me to convert to OneDrive was Office 365. When I was between jobs about 7 years ago, I lost my access to my Home Use Microsoft office copy that I got from my employer (I mean technically, it would have continued to work and nothing forced me to remove it from my PC, but the EULA said that was expected of me, and I did it).

I started looking at Office 365, and determined that for $99 a year, it was an absolutely outstanding deal. I was already considering paying for additional dropbox space and I think back then it was like $119.99 annually for 1TB of space. Well, Office365 was for 5 accounts back then, and was $99 a year and each of my 5 accounts would each get 1TB of space? Holy moly, that alone sealed the deal for me. Even better was that each of my 5 accounts would get the full entire office suite on whatever devices they wanted. Basically I paid a very low price for 5TB of cloud space and got Office for free. My immediate family is a family of 4, we have multiple desktops, multiple laptops, some Windows, some Mac's, etc. Office 365 gave me both the Windows/PC version and the Apple/Mac version of the software without having to buy another license. And they also allow you to share your subscription with friends and families, so I was able to give my 5th account to my dad. < and if I wanted to charge him 1/5 of my yearly subscription price I could. I'm sure he would pay $20 a year for Office and 1TB of cloud space.

Since then, Office 365 has expanded to 6 users on the account for the same price. And I'm qualified through my employer for a 30% price reduction on Office365, so my $99.99 a year is now just $69.99 a year. All of my families cell phones backup pics and videos to their own onedrive accounts...so nothing important will ever be lost. We can install Microsoft Office on anything, and always have the latest version, and never have to deal with questionable companies and license keys again. And my cost is less than it costs to take my family of 4 out to dinner 1 time a year.

And somewhere along the line, OneDrive added bandwidth throttling.....so if I choose to limit my upload speeds, I can do that.

So, since Office 365 is a no-brainer for me, I now use OneDrive pretty much exclusively.

I don't there is any other program on the face of the planet that behaves in this ridiculous manner!
And, does re-enabling those "Hidden" folders magically resurrect the content from the Recycle Bin and place them back from whence they came? No!
You have to go to the Trash Bin and click Restore on all of the files, if you can find them..., or you have to download all sh, stuff from the Cloud again!

Edwin said:

I don't there is any other program on the face of the planet that behaves in this ridiculous manner!
And, does re-enabling those "Hidden" folders magically resurrect the content from the Recycle Bin and place them back from whence they came? No!
You have to go to the Trash Bin and click Restore on all of the files, if you can find them..., or you have to download all sh, stuff from the Cloud again!

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Since I would never have used the Microsoft Backup feature in the first place, I've never seen this. BTW, it is NOT a feature of OneDrive nor is it a part of OneDrive. It's a feature of the programming initially used to set up the Microsoft Backup feature. And I thoroughly disagree with the way it works too. It's way too confusing and will turn off a lot of people from ever using OneDrive. It's very counterproductive and a bad choice for Microsoft to have made.

@Edwin, did you watch the AskLeo video? It explains what happened to you. Your files were never deleted, they were moved. And I agree, that was wrong to do.

TraderGary said:

Since I would never have used the Microsoft Backup feature in the first place, I've never seen this. BTW, it is NOT a feature of OneDrive nor is it a part of OneDrive. It's a feature of the programming initially used to set up the Microsoft Backup feature. And I thoroughly disagree with the way it works too. It's way too confusing and will turn off a lot of people from ever using OneDrive. It's very counterproductive and a bad choice for Microsoft to have made.

@Edwin, did you watch the AskLeo video? It explains what happened to you. Your files were never deleted, they were moved. And I agree, that was wrong to do.

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Thank You very much for that! If anything, it assured me I wasn't going out of my mind!
The video is excellent! The only difference with me was, the moment I turned Backup off, all files from all folders instantly disappeared and ended up in the Recycle Bin!?

I now have a better understanding, though, of how it works, Thank you!

I'm all out of rep, so, here's a bunch...

Yeah, that stupid backup functionality needs to be overhauled. It's just mucking with OneDrive and I can see where it's causing all kinds of grief. Like @TraderGary stated, it's nothing I used before either.....so I haven't seen many of these issues.

However, this functionality @Edwin has demonstrated here, doesn't " NECESSARILY" have to do with the Backup functionality. It has to do with OneDrive and how it handles the hiding of folders.

As a specific example of what @Edwin posted, I went into OneDrive and created a folder called Personal Data, inside of that folder I created Folder1 and inside of Folder1, I created a file called file1.txt. Once that was created, I waited for it to sync to the OneDrive cloud. So, looking good here, got my checkmark and everything. I have done absolutely nothing with respect to backup folders and this Personal Data folder.



However, if I go into settings, and choose Folders and tell it to not show me Personal Data on this PC, look at this warning I get. It says right there that if I hide the folders on this PC, it will be deleted from the PC, but will stay on onedrive. And that is exactly what @Edwin says is happening.



At least here in this dialog it's 100% clear on what it's going to do. And honestly if I am trying to hide a folder on my local PC from somebody, this seems like what I would want it to do. I don't want somebody being able to just go to File Explorer and say "show hidden files and folders" and see Personal Data. Nor, would I want them to be able to pull the hard drive, plug it into another machine and see C: \users\pat\OneDrive\Personal Data. I wanted these folders to not be visible...or moreso....I wanted these folders not on this computer as evidence..

I actually never noticed this because I created my folders that I don't want to see on the PC, directly in the cloud via the web browser. Then I uploaded the private files that I didn't want viewable on my PC to that folder via the web browser. Then I went to choose folders and unchecked the box so that this folder didn't appear in my OneDrive folder tree. So therefore, nothing was ever actually removed from my physical machine because in my case, it was never there to begin with.

pparks1 said:

However, if I go into settings, and choose Folders and tell it to not show me Personal Data on this PC, look at this warning I get. It says right there that if I hide the folders on this PC, it will be deleted from the PC, but will stay on onedrive. And that is exactly what @Edwin says is happening.

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Exactly what I saw the first time!

Very screwed up implementation!

No other Backup/Cloud Service I've ever tried does weird stuff like that!?

If you watch Leo's video at about 16:50, where he shows how you must manually restore items back to the Native folder, via drag n drop..., I wasn't so fortunate..., the moment I turned Backup off, all items disappeared from every folder! Only the online mirrors remained!
It's a fact, cuz I had all the windows open side by side, and they all just poof disappeared all at once, instantly!
Lo and behold, they were all residing in the Recycle Bin!

It's mesmerizing, seriously!
If I wasn't so whipped, I'd re-install OneDrive again and do the whole sh*t-show over again while filming it!

Anyway..., not trying to be a OneDrive hater, just seeking an education! Thanks to all!

Also..., I'm with @glasskuter and must apologize to the OP for the derailment of this thread!
Although..., the last couple pages contain some fairly educational posts!

OP was last seen Monday at 6:22 AM

TraderGary said:

OP was last seen Monday at 6:22 AM

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He's got a lot of catchin up to do!

Again, my apologies.

I wanted to backup files/data I had on OneDrive... Since I have more than enough space on my main PC I just set "keep on this device" and once all were on PC... just copied to my external hard drive.

Edwin said:

Anyway..., not trying to be a OneDrive hater, just seeking an education! Thanks to all!

Also..., I'm with @glasskuter and must apologize to the OP for the derailment of this thread!
Although..., the last couple pages contain some fairly educational posts!

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There's always been "educational posts" in these forums on OneDrive, yet is haven't stopped some of the same people from pushing their lack of knowledge and erroneous information about it.

Seems every time OneDrive comes up, we get the same cast of characters poo-pooing on it.

Just an observation.

Dru2 said:

There's always been "educational posts" in these forums on OneDrive, yet is haven't stopped some of the same people from pushing their lack of knowledge and erroneous information about it.

Seems every time OneDrive comes up, we get the same cast of characters poo-pooing on it.

Just an observation.

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And the same cast of characters who use it all the time trying to convince people it's not the spawn of Satan, and potentially useful when understood.

pparks1 said:

And the same cast of characters who use it all the time trying to convince people it's not the spawn of Satan, and potentially useful when understood.

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Yeah, but the major difference is we're actually trying the dispel the FUD and misinformation!!!

BTW, I find it hilarious we have so many "PC veterans" being intimidated by a simple app

Added to say if you don't like the app, that's perfectly fine. It's the spreading of misinformation and misunderstanding that's concerning.

pparks1 said:

t's trivially easy to change the location of My Documents, My Pictures and My Music when you setup a new computer. You don't have to leave these in the OneDrive folder....it's just where it puts it by default.

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Just because it's trivially easy to you doesn't make it trivially easy for everyone.

pparks1 said:

Well, Microsoft is a for-profit organization. They don't provide you with Windows for free, they don't provide you with Office for free. Apple provides you with only 5GB of free space in their iCloud account. All of these companies are out to make money.

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Of course MS is out to make a profit. That doesn't make it right for them to try and get people to buy something they might not want or need.

pparks1 said:

Almost impossible......Really????? In my first response to #1 above, i said it was trivially easy.

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Just because it's trivially easy for you doesn't make it trivially easy for everyone.

pparks1 said:

Yes, some people are limited. I'd venture to say that they are not the majority. Why cater to the lowest common denominator? The vast majority of people are multiple device these days, phones, tablets, PC's, and such and people enjoy having their data available on the go. Not all, but many.

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The numbers are way higher then you think. I wouldn't be surprised to find that world wide those that do have highspeed internet and a decent data plan are the majority. Besides that I didn't say MS should cater to anyone. What I have said is that MS should make putting the User Folders on OneDrive a opt in choice.

Winuser said:

Just because it's trivially easy to you doesn't make it trivially easy for everyone.

Of course MS is out to make a profit. That doesn't make it right for them to try and get people to buy something they might not want or need.

Just because it's trivially easy for you doesn't make it trivially easy for everyone.

The numbers are way higher then you think. I wouldn't be surprised to find that world wide those that do have highspeed internet and a decent data plan are the majority. Besides that I didn't say MS should cater to anyone. What I have said is that MS should make putting the User Folders on OneDrive a opt in choice.

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I seriously doubt high speed internet is the majority. It probably only really applies to US, Canada, UK, EU, OZ whoch have a combined population les than 1.5 billion. World populatio ln is 8 billion.

pparks1 said:

I will admit that they did make this a bit harder than it used to be.

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It is easy if one knows how. By using pics, your post is going to be very helpful for those that are looking for a solution and find Eleven Forums. Sadly most novice computer users won't be as lucky.

I'm just not using it. I've been uninstalling it for years - who needs the hassle!

First thing I uninstalled when I upgraded to Win11.

My work laptop also tries to get me to use it, but if I'm working from home and enable OneDrive, the machine becomes so slow it's practically unusable.

At home I have a NAS for backup plus a removable disk drive for a further backup that is kept off-site.