Microsoft is facing fresh criticism over its handling of user accounts after another customer claimed the company permanently deleted their Microsoft account.
Streamer Joshua Khane shared the situation on X, claiming Microsoft deleted both his account and associated OneDrive storage even after confirming he was the account’s owner and that it had been compromised.
In the post, he wrote: “Microsoft deleted my account and OneDrive!!?? After acknowledging that I’m the owner of the account and that it was compromised? 25 f****** years of data, thousands of euros spent on games?? My son’s baby pictures? gone.”
He continued: “All because Microsoft couldn’t bring back a compromised account?? One of the biggest companies ever couldn’t do that, so they just deleted that s*** like it was nothing?? F****** shame on you!!”
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.
Microsoft and other cloud services are known for loosing users data. No joke.