I think this particular change is less ‘evil’ than lots of the recent ‘evil’ Microsoft things, so I’m not very convinced by comparing it to bad Microsoft behaviour.
I think the big advantage of backups is that they’ll have been on for ages by the time you need them. That is, their main failure modes are:
- not backing things up because of some misconfiguration
- not backing things up because of running out of money/quota/having a card on file expire
- not having been set up
- deleting files you later want to retrieve
I think it’s actually somewhat hard to protect users from cases 2 and 3 without also ‘nagging’ other users. Causing a user to set things up could be a lot better for them than not setting it up because they quickly clicked through some screen during installation. There is some balance to be had and I think that as tech-savvy / high-literacy users, we should expect to feel like it is more on the nagging end of the scale than we would like.
I don't make that distinction myself. It all falls into the bucket of "Microsoft doesn't respect user agency." Their design decisions are a direct reflection of their (broken) values, full stop.
I think the big advantage of backups is that they’ll have been on for ages by the time you need them. That is, their main failure modes are:
- not backing things up because of some misconfiguration
- not backing things up because of running out of money/quota/having a card on file expire
- not having been set up
- deleting files you later want to retrieve
I think it’s actually somewhat hard to protect users from cases 2 and 3 without also ‘nagging’ other users. Causing a user to set things up could be a lot better for them than not setting it up because they quickly clicked through some screen during installation. There is some balance to be had and I think that as tech-savvy / high-literacy users, we should expect to feel like it is more on the nagging end of the scale than we would like.