This is insane bullshit on Microsoft’s part for sure
…buuuuuuuut
Storing your most important, irreplaceable pictures on someone else’s computer ONLY, with no control over them? That’s an insane practice.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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Storing your most important, irreplaceable pictures on someone else’s computer ONLY, with no control over them? That’s an insane practice.
But it's SOOOOOO convenient! I deserve the convenience! take my money, take my data, I am no weirdo and I need no privacy, just let me have convenience without having to think through anything at all!
It’s probably also on his computer, but now inaccessible without the Microsoft account that contains the bitlocker key for that data
You know, like how fucking ransomware works
Ransomeware As An OS
rrrrraaao~ :3
Unfortunately, Microsoft is making it more and more difficult to actually save things to your local devices. OneDrive went from being just convenient cloud backup to "oh we're your hard drive now"
That’s wild! My Final Windows(TM) is Windows 10 LTSC IoT so I have not experienced that. I don’t really see Onedrive anywhere, thanks to OOSU. I just wish this configuration was more easily accessible to average users.
If it worked properly I would have no problem telling people to do that. You may show people how to back up to a hard disk, but they'll likely not do it. A service that does the backup automatically without the user having to do anything is very useful.
The problem is that it doesn't work properly.
I would never tell anyone to store their most important files only in one place! On top of that, the one place being not your own computer?!
I think these cloud companies have been pretty successful convincing people that at-home storage is more at-risk than the cloud because you could always have a house fire or something, or your hard drive could fail, or whatever. But it seems the pendulum is now swinging the other way as people get wise to the inherent dangers of only keeping things on the cloud, and trusting a company with your data no less.
Computer + cloud backup seems a pretty sensible solution to me. But I'm talking about people who are really not into computers.
One thing a lot of people here seem to miss: The onedrive app actually calls it "Backup". So users assume they have a copy of it on their computer and it is "backed up" to OneDrive.
But the other thing OneDrive does is turn on "Selective Sync", where it will actually delete the files off your local device "to free up storage". It looks like it is on your local computer, but when an app goes to use it, OneDrive quickly downloads it so the app is none the wiser that it wasn't actually there a moment ago. This is all seamless to the user, until one day they are offline and can't get to most of their files, or they lose access to their Microsoft account.
Everything a user needs to know is in the interface, Microsoft gives little symbols on the file to specify if there is a local copy or not, but most users have no idea what any of that means.
To top it off, just a little icing on the cake, if a user signs into the computer with a Microsoft account, bitlocker (full disk encryption) is automatically turned on, and the recovery key is shoved in their Microsoft account. This is convenient, but if they lose access to their Microsoft account, they can't log into the computer to get it, and they can't log into the website to get the bitlocker key. So even if their files are still on the PC, they have zero way to recover them.
Honestly, they've created a very convenient system, until it is impossible to recover anything. Business Environments have administrators that can help users by resetting their passwords or pulling a bitlocker key out of Intune, but for a home user? You're just SOL.
Oh totally. But this thread and the comment you replied to are talking about using ONLY someone else’s computer as a storage location, not redundancy.
I do agree, using only cloud backup storage is a bad idea.
Sorry; did not mean to molest anyone.
The answer is DropBox with full sync. I have an actual folder on my PC with all my data on it, plus it's backed up to the cloud with version control, plus accessible from my phone (or any operating system) in a pinch. Not a shill but I've been using DropBox for actual decades even on Linux and never had a single issue.
That’s not any different to using onedrive with “full sync”.
The difference is that Dropbox has never suddenly changed the entire way that my file storage works, and doesn't randomly unset my preferences during mandatory updates, and doesn't impose itself upon my workflow at every opportunity. It's worked the exact same way as when I started using it. When I want something backed up to cloud, I put it in the backup directory.
I only mentioned full sync at all because it's an option on Windows to make it work the way OneDrive does by default, where it doesn't download the files to your PC. Not sure why you'd want that though.
You’d want that when you have more onedrive storage filled up than you have storage space on your device. I’ve got 2TB+ in onedrive, but have multiple Windows machines where I don’t have 2TB of space to download all that, nor do I want it to be downloaded.
That makes sense. I can't imagine what kind of stuff you'd back up that has so much storage needs though. My use case is I have 1 main PC at all times, I don't even have 2 computers, and my phone. I want everything locally on my PC in case DropBox dies, and I want it on the cloud in case my PC dies. I only really use like 10GB of storage, and only that much because I put all my music on there too
Mostly 50+ years of family photos and home videos, from converted VHS tapes, to thousands of 4K60 HDR videos.
I have it all on my RAID DAS, but I also have it on no less than 3 cloud backup services. With the cost of local storage these days I trust my cloud backups a lot more than local.
I made the mistake of using Google Photos before they became evil, and now I have a huge job on my to-do list to migrate all those photos
(—_—;)
Yeh google photos is one of my backups, and I do hope they one day make a better way to export everything because as it is you lose all of the metadata on every photo/video, which is terrible for archiving photos.
It sucks cause google photos is without doubt the absolute best photo/video manager on the planet.
Microsoft and other cloud services are known for loosing users data. No joke.
It's advertised as cloud storage and incredibly dependable. It business leaders tell people that the cloud is the best because they use it. What they fail to tell you is that you don't meyet to them and they will delete you for any reason.
The advertising is really gross, and so is the required account, one drive on by default, all of it is gross. Someone posted a link to a Nexus interview I’m watching now where folks who have windows installed with a Microsoft account have had their account hax’d and bitlocker enabled on their machine (in all of its backdoored “security” glory) and a pin put on their machine from a threat actor. Insanity! Ain’t no way I’m goin near that
I'm with you, 100%. Each of these big corpos is creating massive ecosystems to entrap users.
When this all started all those years ago, I said to myself I’m not gonna trust any corporation to any of my stuff without a copy. Always used backup CD’s and hard drives, etc.
Hell yeah, saaaame. I do now upload super important stuff in already-encrypted bundles to vetted, trustable, e2e online storage services just in case. But everything else is local server, externals, and discs I need to put on those hard drives now that disc rot is starting to be a thing.
Microsoft logs and transmits everything you type to the company by default. Imagine trusting a company to keep your passwords safe when they can't handle basic business functions like restoring a hacked account?
This is why you never rely on cloud storage. It can be the third copy in your 3-2-1 backup, but should absolutely never be the only copy.
Having cloud as your only backup is generally fine as long as you have it backed up to multiple cloud services. The chances of them all failing or being locked out of all of them at the same time are miniscule.
That's why OneDrive is a thing for dumb people.
Shame on Microsoft for being a shit company.
However, I don't recommend backing up to OneDrive, but if you must, you should encrypt on your local machine first. Also, keep a physical backup. Current situation not withstanding, external SSDs are reasonably cheap.
I wouldn't buy an SSD for storage like that. It's more expensive than a hard drive, for being faster, but this is not your OS drive, you don't need that added performance. hard drives are plenty fast when you are just using it casually, without your operating system and various installed programs actively using it for lots of random reads. they are capable of 100 MB/s reads and writes, as fast but often faster than a gigabit internet connection, which is the maximum a common computer can handle. unless you got a HDD with SMR tech, which will become slower when used as an IT pro, but unless you use it in an array or you write extreme amounts to it at once, it's not going to be a problem.
Besides, SSDs also lose their data quicker when left unpowered for a long time. I really think they are a bad, ill-considered choice for that task. a choice driven by adverts.
external SSDs are reasonably cheap.
They're still not out of reach for most people, but the prices are crazy now. A Crucial 1TB that was $70 last August is more than double that now. That said, most people's data is worth far more than that.
my 4tb SSD i bought 4 years ago for about 150 is now over 2k. It's insane some of the pricing is now.
SSDs are horrifyingly priced now! I picked up a Samsung external 1TB for 90 last year, over 200 now. I wish I had bought more… it took me FOUR TRIES ordering drives to get a… mediocre deal last month. Still over 300 for a 4TB NVMe! Three cancelled orders before I went to a store in the meat world and they had some. Insanity.
Felt this 😭😭😭
I bought 4 1TB drives way back around like 2020-2021 I think, and it was a little under $100, which I covered with an amazon giftcard. It's been running lovely in my mirror zfs raid for about half a year now. Okay well the shitty Orico drive bay has caused some overheating but otherwise the drives themselves are fine.
Now, like 1 of those drives would be about $70-80+ at cheapest...
You shouldn’t be using SSDs as backups.
I believe that was the advice in the early SSD days, and likely still applies for high write commercial environments.
However, modem SSDs are fine when used in a typical home lab set up.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's my understanding.
Nah, still shouldn’t use them for anything other than backups that you need to access frequently, and that’s only cause their speeds make that better. SSDs don’t like sitting around not being used, and can just drop dead at any time, whereas HDDs generally will show signs of failure long before they actually die.
I mean the most recent update took out my one drive and every file that I've removed from it that they sneaky shoved back in it... All my files gone. Thankfully I had just done a back up the week before. I was so mad I just installed mint and said fuck all this shit.
My wife's Facebook account of many years got somehow hacked, at like 3am our time, don't know how, she has an iPhone with 2FA but enabled. First she got an email at that time informing her that the account is disabled and she needs to log in and prove her identity. It got followed by another email maybe 1hr later, that the account got permanently banned. When we woke up, we tried to.log in, but were informed that it is no longer possible. So we appealed to FB email suggested by FB help forums, that you should write for an appeal against their decision. As expected, never got any reply. Those fuckers took down also her business page, as it was connected to her account. About a year after w decided, that she'll make another account. It went fine, at one point they required her to send photos of her id. Instead of confirming her account she got banned directly again, with the page saying something about her not being eligible for FB account. Seriously, fuck that whole shit site, I hope someone takes Zuckerberg out.
The iPhone has 2FA enabled, or F-book?
If your data is only in one place, you've already lost it.