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Comment by CWuestefeld | Hacker News Reader

I agree here, but...

If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder

My complaint is that MS has intentionally made it SO DIFFICULT to do that. There's a significant amount of extra clicking and thinking necessary to go through the steps to do it.

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There is? Not at all. Whatever I save from my browser (Edge/Firefox/Chromium) is automatically saved to Downloads and Downloads is not automatically synced with OneDrive Backup. Backed up is Documents, Music, Videos, Desktop etc. but Downloads not AFAIK.

That's true. I wasn't clear - I was thinking mainly of the Office products: Word, Excel, etc. They've got a whole different Save As dialog that go out of their way to funnel you into OneDrive. So it's interrupting my flow precisely in the course of things I need to use brainpower on themselves.

Additionally if you don't save on Onedrive autosave is disabled. Autosave worked decades ago before we even had cloud storage, but apparently in 2026 we just can't have feature parity with Word 97 without cloud storage.

You can still access the traditional save dialog by pressing F12 instead of Ctrl-S

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/customize-the-sav...

Thanks!

MS actually made it harder to save stuff in OneDrive by basically hardcoding the folders it will backup unlike most other similar services that let you sync arbitrary folders on any drive.

The windows Explorer and the save dialog make it pretty easy to save a file somewhere else. Also, there is just one folder which syncs with OneDrive but some many more which don’t sync with OneDrive.

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