Dear Microsoft – OneDrive is why people hate you

Dear Microsoft,

I recently had a problem with my new laptop and OneDrive that I would like to use as an example of why so many people <strong>hate</strong> you. With a passion. Bordering on, and occasionally qualifying as, fanaticism.

Allow me to provide a small amount of background.

Back in late November I purchased a new laptop to replace my 7-year old gaming laptop that had begun to show its age. I paid for a nice tool to help me migrate my files from my old laptop to my new one, and was in the process of setting the new laptop up when I came across something very much like the screen at right. I thought at the time “Hey, why not set it up and I’ll be able to move a few files around and share them more easily, and sometimes having a couple of backups would be a good thing.” So went through the setup process, along the way missing a couple of very key points. I’ll get to those in a minute.

A few of weeks ago, I was working on something for my D&D game using an Excel spreadsheet when I noticed that my files were being saved by default on my OneDrive rather than on my laptop’s drive. I didn’t want that and I didn’t think I’d signed up for that, so I went through the effort of changing all my settings so that my Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files wouldn’t default to saving out on OneDrive and then I dug into my startup apps and set OneDrive to no longer boot on startup. I figured that this would be the end of it.

I was wrong.

This morning, I went to save another file that I’d been editing and I got an alert that the file couldn’t be saved because there wasn’t enough space on my drive. And my first though was “What the fuck?” See, when I upgraded my laptop I went from a 1 TB disk drive to a 2 TB SSD, and when I checked my storage to make sure something weird hadn’t happened, it was showing a grand total of about 300 GB of storage used. So I had <em>plenty</em> of space on my drive.

That’s when I realized that, somehow, my laptop was still using OneDrive for storing all of my files – my game save files, my D&D game files, my Halloween decoration files, and so on – and that it had run out of space because it was trying to back up all the critical files in that 300 GB, and I’d exceeded the free OneDrive storage allotment that came with my new laptop.

To say that I was unamused would be a rather massive understatement.

So I went poking around in my settings. I went into my Excel and Word and PowerPoint save settings. I searched online for how to stop this, and I eventually found that the Advanced Storage settings (something I’d missed previously) was configured to continue backing up my files to OneDrive. And when I disabled all of that was when I noticed that all my Desktop shortcuts had vanished. Because my Desktop was getting its information from OneDrive too. And when I tried to play one of my games, it completely lost its mind and didn’t remember me signing the user agreement and couldn’t find any of my saved games either. Which made me even less happy than my initial discovery had.

Thankfully, as a 51 year old engineer who used to have to manually update his “autoexec.bat” file and had to use “regedit” a couple of times to fix virus infections and never once bricked his PC in the process, I have some technical knowledge about computers. And about a half-hour after I’d discovered that I still had a major problem with OneDrive doing something I had specifically <strong>not</strong> wanted it to do, I had all my files off of OneDrive and back where they belonged – on my laptop’s local C: drive. I had confirmed that the programs were no longer saving their files to OneDrive and were instead pointing at my C: drive again, and I’d disabled OneDrive backups and turned everything OneDrive-related back off again.

But without those long-ago-learned skills, this would have been a complete clusterfuck instead of merely a serious annoyance. If this had happened to my 82-year old technical novice father, for example, he’d have thrown his laptop through the nearest window and out into the ice and snow.

I tell you this because this is yet another example of why so many people <strong>hate</strong> your company so much that they abandon PCs altogether in favor of Apple products or, gods help us, even Linux.  

I’ve gone through images of the OneDrive setup screens I could find online and there’s not a single one that comes right out and asks, in plain English, anything resembling “Do you want to save your files on your PC, on OneDrive, or both?” Or “Do you want to use OneDrive as your default save location for files?” If that had been clear at any point in the setup process, I’d have selected “Hell no you’re not saving all my files on OneDrive” and moved on. But no, that’s not how the setup screens work. If you follow them through, everything defaults to saving files on OneDrive instead of on your local PC. And conveniently enough, Microsoft charges for that service once you’ve exceeded 5 GB of storage on OneDrive.

Every single time I think that, just maybe, Microsoft has outgrown the “Micro$oft” and “Microshaft” monikers, you go and do something like this to prove me wrong.

I’m not going to abandon my laptop or Windows 11 and migrate to Apple or anything like that for the very simple reason that, as an engineer, all the specialized programs I use are Windows based and either a <em>lot</em> more expensive on Apple or not available in the first place. And I hate dealing with Linux. So I’m trapped. But you know what? I’m going to continue recommending to friends and family that, if they don’t need Windows-specific tools, Apple Macs are perfectly fine for most users.

And I hate Apple even more than I hate you.

Warm regards,

Brian Angliss