Comment by p_ing
2 days ago
One user's stupidity becomes Internet bait for something that's saved so, so much time.
I remember playing the backup & restore game when rebuilding my PC, which I just happened to do last night as I received a new SSD. I didn't have to worry about documents and thanks to a separate volume, redownloading my Steam library, either. That was a massive time save. And it didn't have to be OneDrive, it could have been any cloud sync service -- but OneDrive works just fine.
The user just fucked up and had a conniption fit on Tiktok.
Keeping things in onedrive is fine if you want. What was not fine was moving files there without user informed consent.
There are plenty of prompts, nay, ads, about OneDrive before this ever happens. OneDrive also has a long file history.
The user fucked up. Sadly HN even gobbles this shit up with no thought.
OneDrive doesn't always work fine, though. I avoid it like the plague because a OneDrive screwup caused me loss of valuable data.
Was it user error? Maybe, maybe not, but that's irrelevant. If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily.
How do you lose data on OneDrive? It has a 30 day (if not longer) file history.
All I know is that a bunch of files reverted to very old versions and I found no way to recover from that. It was pure loss. How did it happen? I have no idea. But how doesn't matter at all to me. What matters to me is that OneDrive proved itself untrustworthy.
> If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily.
Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them. In tech you are surrounded by footguns and bear traps. MS made it that much worse by wrapping these in dark patterns that may change without notice but the logic that "dangerous things should be prohibited" is a perfectly good way to end up living in an environment where someone else curates what you can and cannot do. For your protection of course.
A tool isn't dangerous because you can make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake (you can make one with a kitchen knife and we still use them every day). It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations like OneDrive did.
The article is accompanied by a TikTok video I can't scrub through so I can't tell why it's not possible to go to OneDrive's recycle bin and recover the lost data.
Here it is really not a "footgun" that can shoot you accidentally, it is really volontary awful dark patterns.
You say delete my "onedrive" storage content, why on earth someone sane should expect that Microsoft will also delete the data one your computer, that you never asked to be sent to OneDrive in the first place.
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I agree, OneDrive is very similar to `rm -rf`. But I think that is a bad thing for a file sync service to be.
It's worse, because it runs without the users explicit knowledge or consent, and it lacks the implicit guardrails `rm -rf` has (in that most people who use Linux and the terminal are at least literate).
> MS made it that much worse by wrapping these in dark patterns that may change without notice
> It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations.
Do you really not consider the first to be an example of the second?
> Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them.
Shift+Del asks for confirmation. I would expect OneDrive to do at least that much before deleting files off the local machine, even if they're recoverable.
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> "dangerous things should be prohibited"
I never asserted that. I asserted that if a tool is that dangerous, it shouldn't be used on a daily basis. I stand by that. Use it if it solves a problem for you, but intentionally every time, not as a matter of habit or in the background with automation.
> It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations.
OneDrive meets those criteria.
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Shift+Del and rm -rm are pretty hard to use by accident. Onedrive comes with the computer preconfigured to do some pretty unintuitive things.
For example, if a user does not actively change the save location, at least for office apps, the default behavior is to save to onedrive.
Shift and -f are the guardrails.
Use `rm -r` and just press Delete if you want to have protection.
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rm -rf doesn't get this:
https://i.imgur.com/LZGEpGt.png
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Just subscribe to this expensive service!
How about no. I dropped some important documents on a few flash drives that I have lying around.