Microsoft announces a new threat to push people to Windows 11

[pware]

Managing OneDrive is not rocket science.

OneDrive is a folder located at C:\Users\<your user name>\OneDrive

It will appear in File Explorer as a top level storage location with the blue cloud icon and (usually) named <your first name> - Personal

Any folders you create at that location or files you move or store there will be mirrored to Microsoft's Cloud Servers - which are located around the world. I believe that my OneDrive cloud is in Singapore (but I could be wrong about that). Anything you store anywhere else will not be mirrored to the cloud.

Many do not like the idea of their data being stored in a cloud somewhere that is outside their control and at the whim of various organisations. Given the woeful history of data hacks, ransoms, leaks, privacy breaches, etc I can fully understand that point of view. In my case I store nothing in OneDrive that is of a personal or financial nature - i.e. no financial and banking records, names, addresses (including email), personal stuff, etc. In fact the vast majority of what I have in OneDrive is Trainz related.

All my critical personal stuff such as banking records are stored on external backup drives attached to my main computer. They do not go anywhere near OneDrive or any cloud device. I also use those external drives to backup all my Trainz stuff as well. Likewise I do not use OneDrive to backup my photos. Why waste the somewhat limited space for that?

To me the advantage of OneDrive is that I can move from one computer to another knowing that their OneDrives are all sync'ed. So if I have saved a route update from my main development computer as a .cdp file into OneDrive then that file will be almost immediately available on all of my testing computers. On the occasions when I have been travelling and staying away from home OneDrive and all my Trainz stuff always comes with me.

It comes down to sensible data management.

My opinions and experiences.

 

[wreeder]

While the part of the cloud you access from Australia may be in Singapore, the nature of the "cloud" means that your data is also available from many other Microsoft datacenter locations around the world at the same time. This redundancy is the magic of how clouds work. The datacenter in Singapore could go offline and you would never know it.

 

[Forester1]

Here is an article from Microsoft on how to undo OneDrive:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...onedrive-f32a17ce-3336-40fe-9c38-6efb09f944b0

 

[JCitron]

Managing OneDrive is not rocket science.

OneDrive is a folder located at C:\Users\<your user name>\OneDrive

It will appear in File Explorer as a top level storage location with the blue cloud icon and (usually) named <your first name> - Personal

Any folders you create at that location or files you move or store there will be mirrored to Microsoft's Cloud Servers - which are located around the world. I believe that my OneDrive cloud is in Singapore (but I could be wrong about that). Anything you store anywhere else will not be mirrored to the cloud.

Many do not like the idea of their data being stored in a cloud somewhere that is outside their control and at the whim of various organisations. Given the woeful history of data hacks, ransoms, leaks, privacy breaches, etc I can fully understand that point of view. In my case I store nothing in OneDrive that is of a personal or financial nature - i.e. no financial and banking records, names, addresses (including email), personal stuff, etc. In fact the vast majority of what I have in OneDrive is Trainz related.

All my critical personal stuff such as banking records are stored on external backup drives attached to my main computer. They do not go anywhere near OneDrive or any cloud device. I also use those external drives to backup all my Trainz stuff as well. Likewise I do not use OneDrive to backup my photos. Why waste the somewhat limited space for that?

To me the advantage of OneDrive is that I can move from one computer to another knowing that their OneDrives are all sync'ed. So if I have saved a route update from my main development computer as a .cdp file into OneDrive then that file will be almost immediately available on all of my testing computers. On the occasions when I have been travelling and staying away from home OneDrive and all my Trainz stuff always comes with me.

It comes down to sensible data management.

My opinions and experiences.

Ideally and yes, I agree. I only share what I want to share meaning some documents, Trainz parts, pictures, and music I uploaded for that purpose and not because Microsoft insisted, I put everything up there.

The local OneDrive data is nothing more than pointers to the data on the OneDrive and can't be deleted if the PC is offline. If it is online, then that data on the OneDrive is affected and can be deleted. Once reconnected to the network, the data is synchronized between the two locations. This has some interesting gotchas here. If the local PC is infected with one of those encryption viruses, then that virus will attack the files on the OneDrive as well as anything that's local due to the OneDrive application sync'ing the data. This actually occurred a number of years ago to a woman mentioned in an article who got hit by one of these things. As her local data was being encrypted, she saw her OneDrive data being encrypted as well from another machine as the OneDrive app synchronized the changed files.

The way you and I operate is how it used to work then the Microsoft geniuses, or should I say people who are clueless about how other people besides mobile users use their PCs decided that the local data folders, meaning Document, Photos, Videos, and Music will be moved to the OneDrive and also made it extremely difficult, without performing some kind of brain surgery, to get things to work as they used to.

One of the issues I ran into, and this is truly irksome, is when Microsoft did this to me, I got a message that my OneDrive storage was full and I needed to purchase more space or delete content! For the uninformed, they'll automatically fork over whatever Microsoft asks for the storage space and pay it monthly via their credit cards. This is when I took a look and saw what was copied up there and fixed the problem.

When I saw, that Microsoft had attempted to copy not only my nearly 3TB documents folder which also contains my Outlook 2016 .pst files because I don't use cloud email in addition to all the other documents, Virtual Box VMs, plus the music folder, which contains another 5GB of recorded music, and my 7GB worth photos and videos, no wonder the OneDrive ran out of space. To ensure I have enough disk space, I deliberately moved the folders to my spacious 8TB hard drive and here Microsoft was going through great lengths to mess it up.

The other issue I have with this is some applications insist on writing to the documents folder by default and don't like moving their save-location elsewhere. I have a couple of music-editing programs that do that and when one of the programs exports a 2TB raw music recording on the fly, then there's an issue not only with space but also throughput. The data is written at once and can't be interrupted since that causes glitches and clicks and can't be written over the network due to latency. Local disks can have that issue as it is but it gets worse while writing to the cloud.

 

[pware]

Good points.

The only real gripe I had with OneDrive is in how it handles desktop icons. Install a shortcut on one desktop and it will appear on all the desktops even if the app or folder it is pointing to does not exist on the other systems.

I finally (a few minutes ago) found out how to solve this - it is a somewhat obscure toggle switch in the OneDrive settings.

 

[dangavel]

Theres quite an extra energy impact from using cloud storage, here's a couple of instances I found online . "The combination of transmitting your data and storing it in a data center probably requires about 3 to 7 kWh per gigabyte. That's about a million times more than the energy you used to save to your hard drive"
.In a single year the power consumption of a single cloud user can be anywhere between 60Kwh and 1600Kwh. That's the equivalent of running 8 extra fridges running in your home.

The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud

Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage.

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.
At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states. Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions.

Why so much energy? Beyond cooling, the energy requirements of data centers are vast. To meet the pledge to customers that their data and cloud services will be available anytime, anywhere, data centers are designed to be hyper-redundant: If one system fails, another is ready to take its place at a moment’s notice, to prevent a disruption in user experiences. Like Tom’s air conditioners idling in a low-power state, ready to rev up when things get too hot, the data center is a Russian doll of redundancies: redundant power systems like diesel generators, redundant servers ready to take over computational processes should others become unexpectedly unavailable, and so forth. In some cases, only 6 to 12 percent of energy consumed is devoted to active computational processes. The remainder is allocated to cooling and maintaining chains upon chains of redundant fail-safes to prevent costly downtime.
In Bluffdale, Utah, residents are suffering from water shortages and power outages, as a result of the nearby Utah Data Center, a facility of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that guzzles seven million gallons of water daily to operate."

All of this confirms my desire to have nothing whatsoever to do with online storage , my computers go on when i use them and they go off when I am not using them , some of my hard drives are over 15 years old and show no sign of conking out, i use them only when i need them, I see no point in needless wasting energy for a storage system that I do not need to use and which is wasting huge amounts of electricity and water. .

 

[pware]

All of this confirms my desire to have nothing whatsoever to do with online storage , my computers go on when i use them and they go off when I am not using them , some of my hard drives are over 15 years old and show no sign of conking out, i use them only when i need them, I see no point in needless wasting energy for a storage system that I do not need to use and which is wasting huge amounts of electricity and water. .

It is not just online cloud storage. Google, for example, has dozens of data centres around the world (I counted about 35 of them several years ago - some consuming as much power as 10,000 homes) for its search engine, YouTube, etc. Amazon (where this page, the DLC and the DLS are stored) is likewise. Ditto for X, Facebook and all the other social media sites.

So why restrict yourself to banning just cloud storage? To be consistent you would also need to give up on Google (or Bing) searches, YouTube videos, music and TV streaming,, all social media and, not least of all, Trainz.

My thoughts.

 

[dangavel]

It is not just online cloud storage. Google, for example, has dozens of data centres around the world (I counted about 35 of them several years ago - some consuming as much power as 10,000 homes) for its search engine, YouTube, etc. Amazon (where this page, the DLC and the DLS are stored) is likewise. Ditto for X, Facebook and all the other social media sites.

So why restrict yourself to banning just cloud storage? To be consistent you would also need to give up on Google (or Bing) searches, YouTube videos, music and TV streaming,, all social media and, not least of all, Trainz.

My thoughts.

Ah the tired old argument that if I do use any technology I'm a hypocrite and should cut myself off totally from it if I advocate even the slightest bit of restraint. I didn't say I wanted it banned, I said I don't use it . Not telling you not to use it either , but you shouldn't make assumptions, care to point out where I advocated for a ban ?
I try to cut back my emissions because I don't see the point in making more waste than I need do , I cover almost all if my electricity use by 10 kw solar and I rebuilt my house at great cost so it's very energy efficient ,it seems pretty daft to me to waste energy needlessly but perhaps you don't think it's an issue or you have sufficient funds to be able to spend extra on electricity use and damn the torpedoes? .
There's a big difference between a relatively small company like nv3 sharing date online as part of a business model, there really isn't any other way for them to run something like the DLS ....and every individual user of Microsoft's operating system being encouraged to store all of their hard drive contents online , exponentially we are looking at vast amounts of data amounting to hundreds of billions of terabytes vs a few terabytes for nv3 .

Online data storage is the most profitable portion of Microsoft's business, i believe they made over 30 billion from it last year , Amazon is the biggest cloud tech company , Google is also there in the mix, I do use a lot of storage by using gmail, but I have too much info that's essential stored in there to let that service elapse .

If we are to have an interconnected world ,then I do believe that we should attempt to curb some of its worst excesses , if only to save ourselves from shelling out more to big tech companies than we need to , after all they are hardly poverty stricken are they?
Corporate storage is also an issue , according to this article , 200 zettabytes of info online by 2025, what a weird world we live in, if it all was to suffer a prolonged outage we'd be totally stuffed .

https://cybersecurityventures.com/the-world-will-store-200-zettabytes-of-data-by-2025/

 

[pware]

Ah the tired old argument that if I do use any technology I'm a hypocrite and should cut myself off totally from it if I advocate even the slightest bit of restraint. I didn't say I wanted it banned, I said I don't use it . Not telling you not to use it either , but you shouldn't make assumptions, care to point out where I advocated for a ban ?

No, that is not what I stated. I simply made the point that data storage in the cloud is more than just OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. Every time we use the internet (and that includes streaming on our smart TVs) we are relying on power hungry, resource consuming, technology. Your original statement "All of this confirms my desire to have nothing whatsoever to do with online storage" looked at just one aspect of the issue. I pointed out (without any malice) that every time you Google, post on social media or in these forums, download from the DLS, etc, you (and I) are contributing to the problem.

I am sorry that you took it as a personal attack.

 

[dangavel]

No, that is not what I stated. I simply made the point that data storage in the cloud is more than just OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. Every time we use the internet (and that includes streaming on our smart TVs) we are relying on power hungry, resource consuming, technology. Your original statement "All of this confirms my desire to have nothing whatsoever to do with online storage" looked at just one aspect of the issue. I pointed out (without any malice) that every time you Google, post on social media or in these forums, download from the DLS, etc, you (and I) are contributing to the problem.

I am sorry that you took it as a personal attack.

Well, i'm glad you didn't mean it personally.

You are correct that if we use any online services that we contribute to the problem , but I was actually referring to Johns experiences with Microsoft, and to my own personal storage in the context of this thread .

if I download or watch a movie online , its there to be used by anyone, so the energy use is spread around, I only use more energy when I watch it.

But if I upload my own stuff, only I use it and i might not do so for weeks at a time, but a server somewhere on the planet is using electricity and water 24/7 ,365 days a year to just keep my stuff there.

That's incredibly wasteful when I could store it, cover most of the energy through my solar panels and probably only use an hour or so of energy a day to access it, or, in the case of backups, none at all for months at a time. There IS a difference..

I prefer to use my own drives and turn them off overnight and purchase drives as I need them ,thus saving a tiny portion energy. Its futile I know , but old habits die hard, I've never been one to squander electricity if I can help it.

 

[pware]

But if I upload my own stuff, only I use it and i might not do so for weeks at a time, but a server somewhere on the planet is using electricity and water 24/7 ,365 days a year to just keep my stuff there.

That's incredibly wasteful when I could store it, cover most of the energy through my solar panels and probably only use an hour or so of energy a day to access it, or, in the case of backups, none at all for months at a time. There IS a difference..

I prefer to use my own drives and turn them off overnight and purchase drives as I need them ,thus saving a tiny portion energy. Its futile I know , but old habits die hard, I've never been one to squander electricity if I can help it.

We are in total agreement. I regularly go through and prune my OneDrive data so I never get the message that I am running out of space and would I like to purchase more (no thank you)?

All of my OneDrive stuff is also backed up on external drives but they are very inconvenient to move from computer to computer when I need the data elsewhere. That is where I find cloud storage to be a great time and effort saver.

PS: A few months ago we installed solar panels on our roof and that has had a dramatic effect on our power usage and power bills.

 

[lewisner]

So did you have any trouble transitioning to 11 as far as Trainz, software, and any other games are concerned?

I went from W7 to W10 then W11. Windows tells you that you can use Windows Easy Transfer to transfer "everything" to a new installation but I only found too late that WET cannot be opened in W10 or 11. In the process I have lost at least 6 months work since all my saved CDPs disappeared too.

 

[WildWillyWacko]

Not without going through hoops, meaning Microsoft has made this difficult for the unknowing users who are unaware of these changes and wonder why it takes forever to load data. In earlier versions of Windows 10 it was easy but in later ones it's not. In Pro you need to use the Group Policy settings just like Windows 11, but in Home you can uninstall the applet. The problem is MS makes that location the default and then you need to switch your data locations because the local One Drive folders are still on your hard drive. I have found that even though I point my data to a local drive, located on another hard drive, there are some applications that will still use the default One Drive folder even after changing the settings.

How to remove One-drive from File Explorer.pdf

Thanks for this info! I never understood " One Drive " but I downloaded the .pdf and I will Google it and work on that!
I have to wonder if these " Cloud " storage schemes play into the hands of the hackers who seem to be everywhere these days. I often wondered why entities like power Companys are even connected to the internet I thought they used to have their own communications cables that they used to control remote locations and therefore should be immune to hacking but if every one uses Windows and the OS forces or tricks people to use these clouds then we are all doomed!

To illustrate how intelligent Microsoft is, I only currently play two games : Trainz and Age of Empires II and every time I start Age, I get the message : "Do you want to allow the following program from an unknown publisher to make changes to this computer?"

The game has been around since 1999 and was produced by Microsoft's Ensemble Studios, so they don't even recognize their own game!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks, John, you are always a good source of info!

Wild Willy the Wacko