
Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs - ingve
http://www.myce.com/news/microsoft-onedrive-for-business-modifies-files-as-it-syncs-71168/
======
kabdib
SharePoint has always been a piece of garbage. Unfortunately it's a _money
making_ piece of garbage, so there you go.

Inside MS, SharePoint is often used to "track" project documents. Start a
project and -poof- your most unfavorite PM has creates a procrustean bed of
document folders, all set for you to lose your documents in because none of
the categories match anything in the actual product. Like, having whole
separate doc folders for Beta 1 and Beta 2 (there's going to be a second beta,
and the docs are going to be cloned into those? Really?)

PMs: "Please add your documentation to these folders."

Devs: "When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the
history, we can't search them, we can't even _find_ stuff in there, and
SharePoint is slow and the permissions are always wrong, and a year after the
project ships the SharePoint will be destroyed and we will lose all of the
documentation." [All of this is true, especially the bit about not very old
project documentation completely going away, OMFG].

PMs: "We don't care."

Devs: [check documents into the source tree anyway, and write a mirroring
script to copy the things to SharePoint]

PMs: "Stop that."

Devs: "We don't care."

The right answer is, of course, to fire the damned PMs who serially insist on
a crappy excuse for a version control system despite everyone else pushing
back and saying that it sucked hard. Only saw that happen a couple of times.

~~~
kenjackson
_When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can 't get at the
history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there,_

Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to
create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as
release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.

~~~
kabdib
Except that search was always borked, for various reasons (one really special
reason was that search was utterly global, and didn't obey the access rules
that were so vigorously enforced elsewhere, exposing details of your Super
Secret Project to the rest of the company). So search was turned off, and good
luck finding anything. Sheesh.

And getting history out was, to put it mildly, a pain in the rear. Something I
could do in five seconds became a nightmare of bad web UI.

Anyway, the devs in my group had a rule of keeping docs in the source depots,
and we never lost _anything_. Poor other groups, we saw them lose important
design documents when IT decided that the two year old SP wasn't being used
anymore and got recycled. Wow.

Maybe SP does all that whizzy stuff. I just saw it being unutterably stupid,
slow and unreliable in practice.

~~~
skriticos2
I can relate to your experience.

I have seen SharePoint installations at big corporations and they are
horrible.

In one case there was a central SharePoint group that has commissioned the
sites. So we had a highly restricted, utterly gutted and badly corporate
styled thing that was practically useless.

Add to that that there was a weird mix of public and enterprise editions
(which cost a bunch of money and were frowned upon by the org unit).

In this environment you can sit back and watch productivity and common sense
being choked to death. Enterprise is a weird place.

------
danbruc
IIRC OneDrive for Business is not your average cloud storage but build on top
of SharePoint (unlike the normal OneDrive). Therefore this might be some kind
of side effect due to way SharePoint handles documents and document
versioning. It is definitely unexpected behavior but this might be a reason
explaining it without bad intent on Microsoft's side.

~~~
robododo
"OneDrive for Business" is a branding disaster, as it creates a completely
rational link in people's minds that it's the same as OneDrive. In reality,
it's a completely different product that acts in different ways.

Sigh.

~~~
aryastark
It's amazing how wrong companies can get marketing. Take Apple's AirDrop, for
example. I spent 20 minutes one day wondering why my iPhone wasn't connecting
to my Mac Mini. Turns out, "AirDrop" is two different things by the same
company that are similar but completely incompatible.

~~~
shurcooL
Yeah, I hope they improve and fill the gaps in current AirDrop and AirPlay. It
has come a long way, but there's still room for improvement.

Namely, AirPlay between OS X devices and iOS devices (including just audio and
both audio+video), in either direction. Here's hoping for OS X 10.10.

------
jccooper
It's almost certainly "accidental" and a relic of some indexing or something
that Sharepoint is doing to the documents. I'll bet it recognizes XML-ish
content (as the article notes, images and plain text are ignored), tosses it
in a validator or something similar that "corrects" the file, and saves that
file internally. That's not too unusual in the CMS world. The bad part is that
the internal version has found its way back out; hopefully in turning
SharePoint into "cloud storage" they screwed up and sent the wrong thing.
Otherwise, that's rather a mis-feature of SharePoint. If there's anyone here
who actually knows it (I only generally do, being on the OSS side of the CMS
world) I'd be interested to know.

So I'm ascribing this to incompetence and/or bad judgement rather than malice.
But either way, still unacceptable.

~~~
polemic
Sure, but as a cloud sync product it's a _" you had one job"_ situation. Not
so much incompetence as a fundamental failure to achieve that basic
requirement.

~~~
DangerousPie
The problem seems to be that this is not primarily a cloud sync product,
despite what the name might suggest.

------
edmccard
It's not that OneDrive is modifying files "as it syncs"; it's that it involves
Sharepoint, which adds certain metadata to documents that it handles, and has
probably always done so; here's a stackoverflow question about it from 2010:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2762841/how-can-i-stop-
sh...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2762841/how-can-i-stop-sharepoint-
from-appending-msocustomdocumentproperties-to-my-ou)

EDIT: I see that 'ppog has already mentioned this

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7624293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7624293)

------
w124me
Microsoft is not the only one. I had saved a special PDF with settings to full
screen the PDF on open. I uploaded this to my Google Drive to transfer it to
another machine and it completely reconverted the file into another type of
PDF which not only corrupted the document but also broke the full screen open
setting. This is a really random circumstance, but I was surprised to see GD
reconvert the PDF, not store what I wanted "byte-for-byte"

~~~
jmnicolas
The full screen bit might has been seen as malware and was "sanitized" by
their anti-virus.

------
bananas
I've just spent a couple of weeks "unclouding" everything due to a number of
problems like this. I was using OneDrive (the consumer one) with an Office 365
Home sub for doing basic personal finance spreadsheets and it decided to
literally destroy the contents as it was uploaded and downloaded from one
computer to another. I can't really trust it.

I tried Google Drive before and found it unacceptable that it just leaves
links to documents on your local disk. I could imagine that in a network down
situation I'd be in the shit.

So I'm here with LibreOffice and local file storage only now and all is good.

I don't buy the supposed advantage of these services any more. I'm just going
to lump my ThinkPad around and not worry about where my shit is now (it's with
me). I'll keep an offline backup at home and one off site (encrypted).

~~~
lucio
Try BTSync

~~~
nwh
Closed source with that sort of application is uncomfortable.

~~~
jasomill
If you want open source, and you're okay with manual sync and conflict
resolution, I've had good results in the past using Unison[1] to sync multiple
systems.

At this point, though, I've personally settled on a system similar to the GP's
— a backed-up laptop. In the rare event I need to access a document on the
laptop when I've left it at home, there's always ssh, and, in the even more
rare case where I need a document and I've left the laptop elsewhere, there's
always ssh + rooting around Time Machine folders on my backup server. Finally,
for times when I don't want to carry the laptop and know I'll need access to
files, GoodReader[2] on iOS syncs over a variety of file server and cloud
storage protocols.

[1]
[http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/)

[2]
[http://www.goodiware.com/goodreader.html](http://www.goodiware.com/goodreader.html)

------
clemsen
If this is true then Microsoft will have a hard time convincing the majority
of potential users to switch to OneDrive. Although I can imagine possible use
cases altering data without user interaction is unacceptable. What if you had
a git repository stored there? (Yes I know this belongs somewhere else but
some people might want to do it regardless) Although Dropbox apparently looks
at the data to create previews for the Website etc. I have never experienced
altered data.

~~~
wmgries
This article is about OneDrive for Business, not OneDrive. OneDrive for
Business is for business, as the name suggests. SharePoint maybe slow, but it
does have features that users in business like, so having OneDrive for
Business behave like SharePoint is fine.

~~~
Karellen
So must mean it's just like the difference between Windows 8 Enterprise and
Windows 8 Home, yeah? It's exactly the same thing under the hood, but the
business edition just has a few extra businessy bits bolted on top, or
possibly some restrictive anti-features removed? Because that's how Microsoft
branding works, right? Right?

~~~
marshray
No, they're almost completely different under the hood.

[edit] On second reading, I see perhaps you were sarcastic. If so, well
trolled good Sir! :-) I had it coming.

~~~
Karellen
No, thank you for being so gracious and understanding!

------
Havoc
Why risk so much user trust in order to tag some files?

~~~
marko1985
Same question for me. I think it's all about tracking if someone steal files
from your onedrive and then they can track who stole it... maybe? But as a
user of onedrive and google drive i can say that their license agreement on
onedrive (normal customer) doesn't assume owning your files, while google
drives i think is written that they own your files and can modify it without
your permission. At least google say it.

------
lolnope
Disappointing, but a good reminder to not trust 3rd party services with
sensitive data regardless.

~~~
rsync

      ssh user@rsync.net md5 your/file
    

... let's not paint us all with the same broad brush ...

~~~
natch
You may be great today, but nobody knows what tomorrow holds. Therefore, I
would prefer:

    
    
        ssh user@rsync.net md5 your/already/encrypted/file

------
eggnog
Shocking that so many bytes would be added to HTML files. If you were backing
up website views, this could add a lot of bytes per page request if you
published them without realising. Totally unacceptable.

------
sikhnerd
Seriously raises some questions around the whole product, and makes me wonder
if we can ever trust any other third-party with any sort of "sensitive" data.

Luckily there exists plenty of FOSS options that provide a close approximation
of this functionality for me, though I know they will likely never be an
option for the type of companies that rely heavily on things like OneDrive.

------
higherpurpose
They'll probably blame this one on an "error" again, like how they did when it
was found out that Skype was MITM-ing https links, or when Bing was censoring
stuff from China _globally_ , and even in English, and in a couple of other
cases I don't remember well right now. That seems to be their boilerplate PR
response whenever some big privacy infringement happens and many are outraged
about it.

~~~
marshray
I'm interested if you have a cite for MITMing hyperlinks. The only thing I see
sounds attributable to old fashioned cookies and ad networks.

~~~
varkson
I'm pretty sure this user is referencing the link checking bot news that came
out mid last year. Basically, a Skype bot HEADs links placed in messages. It's
hard to say why, maybe it checks for 404ed links.

------
eitland
As much as the "new Microsoft" impresses me some parts of the company still
seems to believe they can get away with anything. :-/

~~~
r00fus
There is no "new Microsoft". The huge ship has shifted course, visibly, and
announced the shift, but that doesn't mean it's completed it's shift, nor does
it mean that everyone in the company is completely aligned yet.

While I'm happy that Microsoft is re-aligning with reality, I still don't
quite trust them yet. They have a lot of credibility to rebuild.

------
borrowedtime
Reminds me of a few years ago when I said that I thought it was likely the NSA
and GCHQ were able to monitor and then inspect without warrants pretty much
anything they wanted on the internet, password or not, and I was ridiculed as
a conspiracy theorist. After Snowden's revelations I see absolutely zero
reason to trust anything any of these companies say or do. And I would use
them all with caution - especially if it's your startup's patent application
stored in onedrive.

