Comment by wilg
6 days ago
I'm trying to understand if it's actually true that he did not "opt in" to OneDrive and that his files "one day appeared" there, which seems unlikely. I'm not here to say Microsoft is capable of designing or engineering anything properly, but I'm trying to understand if this is a bug, dark pattern, "user error", or what.
Backups of course would have helped.
it's a dark pattern. Basically update after update has pushed "protect your computer back up now" and the default option turns on one drive with "on demand" mode for downloaded files.
basically one drive is the only place it's stored until you try to access it then turning off backup will then delete all the local files.
Install Windows 11 and accept the default options. Congrats, your Documents, Desktop, Pictures are now synced to OneDrive. Unless you've read everything during the install, you might not even be aware of it. From now on, deleting files in the web interface will delete them from your computer.
The standard configuration of OneDrive also loves to "steal" files from your local machine. It will upload to the cloud, and then delete the local copy. Which is a great surprise the first time you are offline to discover that the files that were there are now inaccessible.
Thankfully it's trivially easy to disable OneDrive via the task manager startup tab. Never had any issues with MSFT sneakily turning it back on either.
This super aggressive OneDrive shit is also why I've stopped putting most things in the standard folders and now just have my own alternative hierarchy in %USERPROFILE% instead.