I think I get why Microslop tried to do this - being opinionated about the 'true' source of the files allows them to dumb down problems like "which version is the real one" for users and drop conflict resolution UIs, which I think nontechnical people interpret as hostage situations as well. It's not uncommon to see sync disasters - two structures, one local, one remote, and the user has scattershot changes throughout both without consideration for which structure they were using.
Over in Mac land, iCloud still tries to handle conflict resolution sanely, but there's always going to be a sharp edge to cut yourself with anytime you sync files.
It may just be unsolvable for users who don't want to be opinionated and maintain a mental model of how syncing works. Is it sync? Is it a backup? It doesn't matter so long as you understand which one, but that's hard to square with computing being something for everyone, it's simply a bridge too far for many users who don't want to bother or cannot understand.
I'm not sure users actually want sync? All I've ever wanted from cloud stores is a backup of my machine, plus to be able to deliberately store things there. I've never wanted changing a file in the cloud to automatically change the version on the local machine.
That's a whole lot of people being jerks and victim-blaming. He was deceived by a supposedly reputable company into trusting and using a product that in reality offers nothing more than amateurish levels of reliability.
That's horrible! I've heard similar horror stories about other cloud synchronization software. Lesson learned. I don't trust the cloud, and to rent someone else's server. I create my own local backups and don't rely on anyone else. I've been doing the same thing for over 26 years and have never lost anything.
Also their servers are so slow that it can take hours to download couple thousands of files.
And there are many other nice bugs - like sync issues where your work goes randomly poof and nobody believes you because you got onedrive'd ... the fact that there is no messge from onedrive it did that is just messed up on its own
One drive royally screwed me over years ago and I lost many files. Watching this video completely triggered me. It's one of many reasons why I switched to Mac. Too bad I cannot get away from OneDrive because workplace uses them a lot.
Windows keeps on nudging me to use Onedrive at work and I've always refused to do so. But it's become such a pain that I stopped using most office products unless really needed. When saving a file from excel you have to go through all these hoops to save it locally, it's really annoying. Unfortunately the majority of the cattle do use Onedrive and see no issue.
Well onedrive is nothing more than sharepoint disguised as a cloud drive. So they adapted a legacy pre-cloud era code to create a competitor to dropbox and google drive. Imagibe how well that code works…
I learned my lesson when Microsoft OneNote, upon having my notebooks full and my storage cap hit, did not even allow me to delete anything, because I could not save due to "storage full". However, it was also impossible to export OneNote locally because the newer apps only work with the cloud. I had to download an older version to download my files, delete some notebooks, and go back under the storage cap.
Or I could have paid Microsoft. But I did not feel like it.
I put all my cloud file sharing into the same local folder and let them fight it out, but also have a bitorrent sync of my monthly disk image as the backup.
Over half of my coworkers (and myself) have suffered data loss due to OneDrive, and so most people I work with go out of their way to avoid it. Management pushes people to use it anyway.
On a related note getting my share of data back from OneDrive was a painful exercise - tons of spurious write errors I spent best part of my evening getting everything back to my filesystem. Yes remote by default was enabled without my consent.
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For context, Jason Pargin is an American novelist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Pargin
weekly it selects a directory at random, deletes the entire contents, then puts a 0 byte file with the same name in its place
Over in Mac land, iCloud still tries to handle conflict resolution sanely, but there's always going to be a sharp edge to cut yourself with anytime you sync files.
It may just be unsolvable for users who don't want to be opinionated and maintain a mental model of how syncing works. Is it sync? Is it a backup? It doesn't matter so long as you understand which one, but that's hard to square with computing being something for everyone, it's simply a bridge too far for many users who don't want to bother or cannot understand.
OneDrive is not backup.
RAID is not backup.
Or I could have paid Microsoft. But I did not feel like it.