
OneDrive has stopped working on non-NTFS drives - protomyth
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/onedrive-has-stopped-working-on-non-ntfs-drives/
======
nxc18
It would be really nice if Microsoft kept some of their products in a
consistent working, high-quality state.

As a long-term OneDrive (SkyDrive, Windows Live Mesh, FolderShare) user, it
has been really disappointing to see features come, go, then come back. I
can't upgrade operating systems or even update the app without fear of losing
critical features.

For example, being able to transparently access networked (not locally
downloaded) files used to be super easy, then it went away, and is now
apparently coming back.

Similarly, Windows Live Mesh had really good versioning, a really useful
remote access service, and really cool collaboration tools. Then it went away
and has never been replaced.

OneDrive used to have 25Gb storage for free; that was a really good deal. Then
it went to unlimited storage for Office users, but then they stopped that for
no good reason.

tl;dr I'm not going to be a OneDrive customer for much longer. Microsoft makes
it really hard to be a fan of their products. :(

~~~
pirocks
There was abuse of the "unlimited storage", by the data hoarder subreddit.
This gives yopu an idea of how much they stretch the definition of
"unlimited":[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/)

~~~
simlevesque
> stretch the definition of "unlimited"

You can't stretch the definition of unlimited. There is literaly no amount
that would stretch it. If you advertise unlimited storage, you are bending the
truth, since there is no such thing as unlimited disk space. I don't see how
anyone can blame the data hoarders here. Where I live, if you advertise for
something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for
it. I just don't see why they feel the need to lie to customers like that.

~~~
Steko
I blame them just like most of the other data hoarders are blaming them. One
or two guys shit in the pool and got the whole thing canned. You can certainly
qualify unlimited service for reasonable use.

~~~
papaf
_You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use._

There was some UK court case where the ruling agrees with what you said.
However, both then and now I disagree with it.

The reason is it is absolutely wrong in terms of language:

    
    
      unlimited - without limits
      reasonable use - use limited to a reasonable amount
    

The other problem is that reasonable is not a number. Everybody has a
different reasonable. This is the same as saying a service has a secret limit
which you won't be told about.

Why not just say there is a 5GB limit? That would be clear, fair and not at
all misleading.

~~~
keithpeter
UK: What 'reasonable' means is decided by a court when there is a case. They
do take circumstances into account (e.g. domestic user or business &c)

I do think that there should be segmented contracts with numerical ranges in
to avoid idiots.

------
chis
I have much more trust in a company's product if it's their main source of
revenue. Dropbox would probably die if they lost all their desktop users, but
there's really no reason Microsoft even cares about this.

Anecdotally, OneDrive lost my changes to an essay twice, so I will certainly
never use it again.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
OneDrive - or DropBox - is no backup solution and also doesn't relieve you
from backups.

~~~
jhasse
I have relied on Dropbox as a backup solution for years. Never had a problem.

~~~
SippinLean
Originally you had no backups OOTB. Now I think you can restore deleted files
for a month, or longer if you upgrade. This might be enough for your use case.

Otherwise it is purely sync (not backup).

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ourmandave
This can't be. OneDrive loves me!

I know because it keeps starting up whenever I transfer files from a Centos
Samba share despite every restraining order I've tried to issue.

Of course only the Group Policy editor can stop it and that did't come with
the forced Windows 10 Home edition update shoved up my hard drive.

So now, in a complete turning of the tables, I'll have to wait for it to start
up and then it will tell me to go f*ck myself.

~~~
technofiend
You can upgrade Home to Pro for about $15 by buying the license from eBay. Not
that you should have to but there you go...

~~~
joshschreuder
They're also likely to be OEM licensing with questionable legality regarding
resale

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JamesAdir
onedrive, onedrive for business, onedrive app - Same name not the same
product!

every one of them with different UI, different settings and never works
without a failure. Try sharing a folder between team mates in office365. In
dropbox it just appears to every team member. In office365 you need onedrive
for busines (the regular onedrive that comes with Windows 10 won't show it)
and then it appeas as a sharepoint folder the user. So confusing, So not
working.

~~~
camus2
> onedrive, onedrive for business, onedrive app - Same name not the same
> product!

They did that with Visual Studio too. On Mac it's basically some IDE to
develop Ios and Android apps, while on PC you're getting the actual IDE.

And they do that with Skype too, where "Skype for business" is a completely
different product that has barely anything to do with Skype.

~~~
titanix2
And there is Visual Studio Code which is totally unrelated code editor
available on multiples platforms which add more to the confusion.

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trelliscoded
I just did a greenfield deployment of Windows Server 2012 R2 for a big
virtualization environment, and ReFS was supposed to be ideal for that kind of
application. Everyone I talked to about it told me it was a bad idea, mostly
because the supposed gains in certain virtualization operations wasn't worth
risking being the first sucker to find a corner case in refs.sys. Also, no
data recovery tools support it outside of experiments.

Does anyone actually use ReFS in production?

~~~
DiabloD3
I don't use ReFS in production, only for personal use, but Win 8.1/Server 2012
R2's version of it should never be deployed in production.

If you're interested in ReFS, use Win 10/Server 2016 instead. Microsoft has
made a lot of updates and changes to the codebase, including ones to prevent
data loss. They're now essentially pitching Storage Spaces+ReFS as a
Microsofted ZFS.

------
powertower
NTFS has all the advanced folder and file features like Junction Points and
Hard Links.

> The FCU includes a huge revamp of OneDrive's functionality to make the use
> of local and remotely stored files virtually seamless.

I'm assuming it makes heavy use of that.

------
dingo_bat
I don't want to keep paying Onedrive any longer. But Dropbox is very expensive
(becuase the only plan is 1TB). I want to avoid google drive because I know
they will kill it randomly. What else is there?

~~~
victorhooi
Why do you think Google will kill Google Drive randomly...?

There's no precedent for something like that, and I can't see what motivation
there would be to do such a thing either.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google).

~~~
dingo_bat
Plenty of Google services have been killed/deprecated, even when they were
widely used and popular. Google reader, hangout, gtalk, come to mind. I'm wary
of getting burned again.

So I have decided I will never use any google service for something that I
really need to rely on. I have a throwaway gmail for giving out to all kinds
of spammy websites. I use google photos for backup but also do a full backup
on Onedrive. I have a play music subscription but that's not very sticky
anyway, I can switch to Apple music at the first sign of trouble.

Also, if you work for google, I'm surprised you think there is no precedent
for google discontinuing stuff! It's literally a meme at this point.

~~~
victorhooi
It seems to be a bit of an internet meme, but as another poster noted, the
original logic seems to have been lost, and it's now simply cool to quote the
meme.

You say plenty of Google services have been killed - and you cite 3. But only
1 of those has actually been killed.

Google Reader _was_ shutdown - this is somewhat personal, as I was a bit lover
of Google Reader as well. However, there was 12 months of notice for the
deprecation, there were provisions for migration/exporting all your data - and
there were reasons mentioned at the time for why it was deprecated. Basically,
the writing was on the wall for RSS for a long time before that.

Hangouts wasn't discontinued...in fact, I use it as my main chat application
currently (both in my personal life, and at work).

GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements - same contacts, same chat
history, same platform. Everybody was basically just migrated across
wholesale, and got some nice new features to boot (e.g. group video calls).

~~~
dingo_bat
> the original logic seems to have been lost

I don't know, Google reader is still not up. What logic is lost?

> Hangouts wasn't discontinued

It is abandoned, which is worse than dicontinued. No new features, some
features have been removed. Apparently it's "enterprise" focused now.

> GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements

Wrong. Read up about this tiny thing called federation. Hangouts is a small,
walled-garden subset of gtalk. And even hangouts is deprecated now (at least
for consumers). Now if you're a consumer and want to use a google service for
chat, you have allo. Allo is a dumbed down subset of hangouts. No multi-device
support, no web app, no voice, no sms integration, no video. It has stickers
though. Guess some people are fine with that. I'm not.

------
iosDrone
I flew the coup on OneDrive when they reneged on their promise to provide
unlimited storage. They still charged me $50 for the months that I signed up
on the basis of that false promise.

~~~
bitmapbrother
Speaking of reneging, remember the time they told their users that they would
be lowering their storage to 5GB? Now, I'm not sure of the exact reason why
they needed to do this, but you quickly lose confidence in their capability as
a cloud provider when they need to start clawing back storage from users.

Meanwhile Google has been offering their users 15GB and additional storage
bonuses for completing tasks such as your annual security checkup.

~~~
ukyrgf
Weirdly, I got more space when they went free. I think I signed up on my
Android for OneDrive to store my "camera roll" which gave something like 25GB
free. I used that storage briefly to store/share .wav files for my band's EP,
which took up a couple GB. When OneDrive announced their downgrade to 5 GB,
they gave a free year of Office 365 to anybody that was currently using more
than 5 GB. I think that expires later this month, at which point I will NOT be
re-subscribing. It's miserable trying to maneuver around these cloud services;
I'm sticking with Resilio Sync.

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nvr219
I remember when people used to get mad at Microsoft because they supported
legacy stuff for years and years and years.

~~~
Omnius
Well they could made an announcement or email their user base letting them
know of the breaking change.

~~~
nvr219
This makes me wonder, do they have data on how many users are saving onedrive
files on FAT? Is that info they could pull? I don't see why not...

~~~
vthriller
That'll be Windows Telemetry story all over again: lots of people opting out
or complaining everywhere they can.

~~~
gnud
They wouldn't need telemetry - they could have shown a local warning when the
OD client detected a FAT drive.

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duncan_bayne
Those looking for alternatives should take a look at SyncThing - open,
decentralised and open source.

I use it to synchronise files across a range of devices - home NAS, phone, and
laptop - and love it.

[https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

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tiernano
For reference on the ReFS part, everywhere I have read about it mentions it’s
for servers. Just like ntfs was when it started out. Guessing when it becomes
more main stream, it will probably be supported then...

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calvano915
The OneDrive syncing client has never worked properly for me since Windows 8.
Just crashes and restarts, despite attempting all the fixes described online
officially and non.

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javabean22
Never change, Microsoft, never change

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std_throwaway
You have to go with the times or you have to go in time.

------
thriftwy
What else would you expect from Microsoft?

Last, I don't know, four releases of Windows were comically bad. This is when
you no longer swear but just laugh in amazement.

I would argue that from their last 6 releases (starting with Windows ME) they
only had one success, that is, Windows XP, and even that one they had to
rethink with SP2.

(Just bought my wife a Windows 10 laptop... Sigh...)

~~~
orf
The fact you brought your Wife a Windows 10 laptop and not a Ubuntu one kind
of goes against the case that Windows is comically bad.

~~~
thriftwy
Ha-ha, you're not getting anywhere.

The fact that every laptop comes with Windows 10 proves that nobody cares
anymore whether the produce is useful or not.

"You can buy a laptop. Whatever you get, it's with Windows. It's not very good
but that's what you're getting. Are you buying or not?"

Come to think of it, Windows laptops are comically bad too by themselves. Wide
screens that nobody asked for. Cheap plastic of casings. Unreasonable
thickness. General ugliness.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The fact that every laptop comes with Windows 10 proves that nobody cares
> anymore whether the produce is useful or not.

Chromebooks are laptops. They don't come with Windows 10.

MacBooks are laptops. They don't come with Windows 10.

~~~
thriftwy
Guess what? Outside of USA and Europe, chance of having either one in a shop
is exceedingly small.

I've not seen a single Chromebook in my life and Macs are exclusively for web
programmers.

So Windows 10 is what you get, one might call it BrezhnevOS or PutinOS.

