OneDrive data now has an expiry date

I’ve seen a lot of people have issues with git, because this is going on in the background and they don’t realize it.

They’ll change branches, then OneDrive sees files are missing, so it starts pulling them back down. It makes a mess.

Any new hire we get, we need to make sure to explicitly tell them not to keep their code in a folder managed by OneDrive, but they never listen. They speak up about a month later, complaining about weird issues.

On my last laptop refresh I also had to manually enable the sync. It didn’t just happen. I knew if I used the local folders that would eventually stop working and things would get lost.

I’ve also seen a lot of confusion from people who save something to their desktop, and it’s not there… because they didn’t save it to their OneDrive desktop. This is always fun to explain.

OneDrive is also now our backup, but they only sync 3 folders from the home directory. If your work has you using other folders, good luck and enjoy your data loss. I setup a scheduled job to backup some of my other key files to OneDrive, but that was quite annoying. I’m sure I’m in the minority.

The enterprise enables all this stuff, but never actually tells anyone. They think it will “just work”, but it creates a confusing mess that every employee eventually has to figure out.

The best thing you can do with an enterprise Onedrive is having long long file and folder names. The moment it exceeds 255 characters, the software application dies. I am ready to hear easier fixes but so far this worked:

- Rename the offending folder from the web

- Unlink the folder from the user's machine

- Delete the existing onedrive folder

- Relink and resync

The best part is, the web side of onedrive has practically unlimited length, the windows part has. As long as you don't sync, you don't experience anything but god forbid if you try to do it.

Also do not get me started on "Add a shortcut/Sync" debate. All in all, onedrive feels like a system that works but will feed you to the wolves the moment it hiccups. But on the enterprise side that's the only game in town so... we suffer altogether.

The whole thing is a cobbled together bodge over SharePoint as a backend. I wouldn't ever trust my company data with that dogwater product.

Back when I had to work with it I found a bug that could cause folders to become un-synced without you realising, meaning changes would not be tracked and cause merge-conflicts when it was fixed.

Managed to use our Gold partner tickets to raise the issue with the product team, they flat out refused to fix the issue even knowing it was a bug. This was back in 2020 or so, I wonder if they ever fixed that bug. It's pretty simple to reproduce:

1. - Sync a nested subfolder from Sharepoint

2. - Sync the parent folder

3. - Note that the folder synced in 1. is not longer being tracked (no checkmark)

4. - Normal users will now go to folder 1. by default and have no idea none of their changes are no longer being tracked now that it's being synced within folder 2.

Plus the sync results in so many errors and duplicates even on a personal drive with one machine that it is not fit for purpose.

Downloads folder to the rescue, hallelujah!

> solution to a problem nobody really had.

It's honestly been great for my org. We used to have custom user-specific shared drives on the network. Laptop replacements were constantly hindered by people not understanding how to transfer data. Since we rolled out OD (not my decision by a mile), that's been consistently easy.

And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost.

YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.

OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.

>So when I'm on site somewhere, and have no access to a network that's safe, I can't access files that are in my documents folder, pictures or desktop.. when I never asked OneDrive to lift and shift my days off my machine.

Probably enterprise config. Standard OneDrive office 365 enterprise with SharePoint can absolutely work over the "normal internet", you don't need a "network that's safe" whatever that means. VPN? Anyway the big office 365 win was it will work over the normal internet without running /owa open on your exchange server.

OneDrive likes to come back when O365 updates I think, but you might be able to change the settings to just not back those dirs up?

No access to a network that's safe? Do you have a zero day on SSL we should know about?

You can easily set OneDrive to keep a local copy of all files.

Come on, a problem nobody really had? I wholeheartedly disagree. Data loss and the orthogonal problem of lacking free space on computers is/was a massive problem at enterprise scale and OneDrive, for all its many shortcomings, is well and truly into good-enough territory to cover the 80% case. I'd go so far as to argue that the scenario you've described is by far the less frequent one. And if it frustrates you, you're afforded the ability to designate files and entire folders to be kept downloaded at all times anyway.

>One drive is an insanely poorly implemented solution to a problem nobody really had.

I highly doubt that the need to steal as much data and media from people to train AI was a problem nobody really had.

Indeed, they are probably one of the worst cloud "storage" services ever to exist.

I also lost data on their platform. Not sure why anyone would like to still use them. This follows a pattern of Microsoft mishandling their user's data. They even routinely delete code hosted on their servers when they shutdown services without handling the migration well.

I'm building a digital document archive organizer platform that relies on users' own local machine storage and their cloud storage, and the only provider I trust to support are s3-compatible storage and Google drive (much as I'm wary of Google, Gdrive is reliable). Dropbox, Box, etc are also ok, but the storage is kind of expensive.

I would never support OneDrive.

This is data theft and there should be criminal charges against Microsoft for this nonsense.

Data request. Or just sue them.

[flagged]

Whenever I was forced to interact with OneDrive, I couldn't help imagining the proverbial digital duct tape holding everything together behind the scenes.

It's LLM phraseology.

It comes up with a scenario where it could be a problem ( license removal ), and then it generates why a license might get removed ( "cost-saving" ).

It's not a person thinking, so there's no real thought to whether it is really a likely scenario, it's just something that sounds plausible.

I read too many blogs, I've come to spot these phrases that trip a feeling of, "Wait, do people really do that?".

You'll still have someone along in the comments to suggest that this article isn't AI slop, and that people really do remove individual one-drive licenses from active people in an organisation to cut costs, that this is just "edited" by AI, etc.

But it's slop from start to finish. Or in LLM speak, "The slop is real".

> or a licence gets removed as part of

Or, as is more common in large enterprise licensing schemes - the vendor changes the terms and the customer never notices. And the .gov side of Microsoft licensing changes as often and as inscrutably as the commercial side of Microsoft licensing.

We've had more than a few discussions where conference calls with Microsoft end with the "oh, that used to be part of your license, but now it isn't" with the only solution being to bend over and open up the agency's wallet.

Also the deletion will kick in after 12 months

> Day 1: licence removed or user deleted: The clock starts. The OneDrive account is now unlicensed and the retention countdown begins.

> Day 60: read-only mode: No more edits.

So yeah if you spend 12 months without realizing you might need the data of someone who left then I think that's on you

> Someone leaves your organisation

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/retention-and-d...

"By default, when a user is deleted, the user's manager is automatically given access to the user's OneDrive"

Seems like it should be enough time to firesale the data out you need as a manager.

At least onedrive do not corrupt my powerpoints, while pcloud systematically break them, police change, elements resized randomely. It happens systematically with powerpoints weighting more than 100Mb.

Don’t worry, you have ~30 days, that should be enough for you to audit your entire org. /s

It is in Messace Center post MC1381210, published June 5.

Microsoft had the idea that PCs are like phones.

Google/Apple sync everything in the background so Microsoft wanted to do it as well.

What does this have to do with the article you're responding to which is about OneDrive for Business?

More HN comments, less reddit comments, please.

I am on an enterprise environment. I had non stop issues with OneDrive, such as OneDrive process always pegged at 100% CPU, files not synching, files going cloud-only and inaccessible without Internet, and issues in git repos. I go out of my way to avoid OneDrive at any cost, including the cost of using a separate backup system for my files.

Lo and behold*

Git folders doesn't go well with onedrive.

Nah, this is just slop.

Took me 10 seconds to find this better link: https://mc.merill.net/message/MC1381110

Cough up the dough, or away your files will go.

I'm also unsure what they wanted Microsoft to do. Just store data that apparently doesn't belong to anyone anymore forever?

AFAIK Sharepoint doesn't have these limitations. The idea is that in companies OneDrive should not be used for permanent stuff. Which is strange, to be granted, but after all using OneDrive for company documents basically means they are being shared out of some personal space that doesn't belong anywhere.

Arguably, this situation is already broken right now. If an organization can't be bothered to use their tools (Sharepoint and the wider O365 ecosystem) correctly, it's entirely on them.