Comment by 9x39
5 days ago
I think I get why Microslop tried to do this - being opinionated about the 'true' source of the files allows them to dumb down problems like "which version is the real one" for users and drop conflict resolution UIs, which I think nontechnical people interpret as hostage situations as well. It's not uncommon to see sync disasters - two structures, one local, one remote, and the user has scattershot changes throughout both without consideration for which structure they were using.
Over in Mac land, iCloud still tries to handle conflict resolution sanely, but there's always going to be a sharp edge to cut yourself with anytime you sync files.
It may just be unsolvable for users who don't want to be opinionated and maintain a mental model of how syncing works. Is it sync? Is it a backup? It doesn't matter so long as you understand which one, but that's hard to square with computing being something for everyone, it's simply a bridge too far for many users who don't want to bother or cannot understand.
We’ve had a solution for decades, for conflict resolution to ensure data is never lost to a misconfigured merge - it’s called a filesystem! Put a copy of anything pre-deletion into an archive that’s relatively hidden from view, but have a line of documentation saying: if something appears deleted, fear not, see this dot-prefixed backup.
The fact that Microsoft has stepped backwards from this is an intentional choice and should be criticized as such.
I see it as a natural progression of something that's been going on for a decade -
1. They sell Office w/ OneDrive plans, and push online-first work through corp and home plans alike.
2. They have become progressively more opinionated over the Windows ux in the last decade. Updates mandated, security agent coming installed, Secure Boot by default, drive encryption by default, etc just like corp fleets do as a standard.
Files are the logical progression, if you squint here - MS is the user's administrator, since Windows arguably needs a sysadmin to make it usable. This is.. not new in the corp model: messing with the filesystem or linking to remote file systems has happened since the bad old days:
-remote shares
-roaming profiles
-folder redirection
-OneDrive known folder move
I think this is the click of the ratchet, as Windows continues to take ownership of its OS back from its users, bit by bit.
One problem with just relying on the native filesystem is that while SSDs are tremendously reliable these days such that they make mechanicals look laughably flaky, any FS can get corrupted, and with encryption by default, you're usually leaving users up a creek.
Anyway, the Microsoft view, best I can tell, is that a PC should be more like a phone - an appliance, managed by the vendor. They know the filesystem is a great solution - their filesystem, not yours. If you use their PC with an online account, it sort of works like that. If you try to hold on to ownership, non-tech users usually end up mishandling the sharp edges at some point.
If you don't know how to safely provide a feature, you shouldn't be making it easy to turn on the feature, if you provide it at all. There's no law of the universe that required them to solve this.
> If you don't know how to safely provide a feature, you shouldn't be making it easy to turn on the feature,
I guess the name "Microsoft" doesn't says anything to you. /s
I'm not sure users actually want sync? All I've ever wanted from cloud stores is a backup of my machine, plus to be able to deliberately store things there. I've never wanted changing a file in the cloud to automatically change the version on the local machine.