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Comment by moontear | Hacker News Reader

Wholeheartedly agreed. Also the OneDrive Backup feature is great - previously people had to rely on other services (Box, Dropbox) and remember to save stuff into those folders. Now your most important Documents folder is saved in the cloud. Great. Backup! I don't think that OneDrive pestering you about buying more storage after using up your free storage is a bad thing, somebody needs to pay for stuff.

I understand the point, that everything is a bit convoluted and badly explained and may even lead to bad stuff happening. When you disable OneDrive Backup (good feature) and OneDrive deleting all your files locally with a little shortcut to OneDrive in the Cloud with all your files? Yeah... that is bad practice, but an easy fix for MS. Besides that hickup I currently don't undestand what the fuss is about.

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None of this is new. They haven’t fixed it for years. At this point it’s not an oversight or mistake, but fully intentional behavior.

I prefer the Dropbox solution, and tend to configure OneDrive, Google Drive, etc the same... I like to be explicit about it... I don't want all my general docs sync'd, for that matter, most of my projects are in a git repo anyway.

I know my Documents/Pictures directory isn't sync'd, I don't want it to be... to me my workspace is far different than what I want backed up to the cloud... I also have a local nas that is also setup for cloud sync for my service accounts. I emphatically do NOT want system default workspace directories sync'd.

How does this work with multiple PC's? Does it just merge all files into the same Documents folder? What if apps are saving app data to these folders, and you have the same app on multiple computers?

All your multiple PCs have the same Documents folder. Files created on one PC are synced to the cloud and appear in all the other PCs' Documents folders, and will be downloaded to the local storage if you try to access them. You get a small icon next to each file or folder to try and tell you if the files are local or in the cloud or whatever status. If apps are saving data to synced folders (eg. all those many many games happily polluting my Documents folder), then that same data is available to the same app on different computers. Could be good, or bad if the apps are being used on different computers at the same time with no real way of determining which PCs changes win for which particular file.

> All your multiple PCs have the same Documents folder. Files created on one PC are synced to the cloud and appear in all the other PCs' Documents folders

That sounds horrible.

> Could be good, or bad

It sounds bad either way. If the app exists on both computers there's good chance of conflicting overwrites of whatever is saved there. If the app is not used on a device then it's just a waste of downloading and syncing useless data.

They should just make the computers and have subfolders in a shared documents folder AND prompt you about so this before starting so you can turn off this or that folder before anything gets uploaded or downloaded. It's user-hostile design currently

> That sounds horrible.

This is how Roaming Windows User Profiles work at most companies. I don't understand why you think it sounds horrible.

It doesn't matter what I think, and you don't have to understand. Just don't turn it on by default, and if you do, make it safe and easy to turn it off.

Tooling and workflows that make sense on a centrally-administered domain do not belong on my home computer.

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