Stay away from Microsoft OneDrive! But not that far away...

Update 14 December 2019: Microsoft seems to have fixed the problem mentioned below. I just connected with another computer, and with the same manipulations I did below, everything worked reasonably well. Caution still needed, however.

My previous post was about how great it was to have all my data in the Cloud, in case I lose my laptop. It is only fair that I now describe the disaster that a cloud service can cause. In this case Microsoft's OneDrive.

For many years, I have chosen to sync a few folders from OneDrive to my local storage on my travel laptop, so they can be indexed by Spotlight. The rest of the folders are huge, and I see no reason to keep them locally on all devices.

A few hours ago, I tried to connect to a city library WiFi. The library had problems with their certificate, and after a few attempts, I gave up. However, OneDrive eagerly asked me to add my credentials again, asked me to select my local folder (which has not changed for years) and as soon as I got on a more reliable network, it started downloading my entire OneDrive to my local storage. This process blocked my laptop, it blocked the Preferences panel of OneDrive, so I could not even access the place to stop the disaster.

OneDrive, enthusiastically created folders all over my local storage, and when I after twenty minutes finally managed to tell it to stop the mayhem, it told me that it had 16000 changes to to through. It blocked my computer with 16000 things that had not happened.

The panel where one selects folders to download finally appeared, but it was still frozen, so it took minutes to scroll down the 15 items and to unselect the folders I had never selected to start with.

I then disabled their deleterious "Files On-Demand" service, which I had never asked for or enabled.

After two hours, I now have a sync message, which says that OneDrive "needs my attention" to solve problems Microsoft's incompetent programmers have caused. Five folders "already exist" in the "same location online". I never created those folders! Microsoft's disastrous software did. I have no idea what will happen if I delete, rename or copy those folders, and I bet neither does Microsoft.

Update: The way I got out of this may or may not have avoided disaster, but I think it was reasonably safe. I took the following steps:

1. Rename all the folders with "problems" according to OneDrive. I added "- garbage" to the end.
2. Wait for all the garbage folders to be uploaded to OneDrive.
3. Check the file list in the web-interface to OneDrive. Make sure the files are there, and that they are unlikely to contain data that is in the original folders.
4. Delete the garbage folders using the web-interface.
5. Wait for OneDrive to sync and removing them from my local storage.

I do not know if this was the safest or quickest way of rescuing my folders, but it seems to have worked.

Sending your worries to the clouds

I just came back home after a pleasant ten day holiday with good friends. As soon as I came back, I went to my bedroom to pick up my laptop, which turned out not to be on its usual place. I then looked for it at its unusual place. It wasn't there either. I then looked at all the places where I could have placed it, but it was nowhere to be found.

I realised I probably had forgotten it at a café or restaurant before I left for holiday, so I walked around to a few places, asking waiters and other staff if they had found a laptop that looked lost. Nobody had.

The moral of this is not that one should be careful with one's laptop. The moral is that I never for a moment felt anxious. I have all my data in different clouds: google, Apple, Microsoft and Adobe. Even if the laptop was lost for ever, I knew no data would be lost. I might have to pay for a new laptop, which admittedly would be irritating, but no data would be lost.

I'm aware that there are some security risks with cloud services, but for my mostly innocent data, the benefit of convenience vastly compensates for the risk of data theft.

(I did find the laptop at home in the end. I had for some reason placed piles of paper on top of it before leaving, and as soon as I reached for the papers, the laptop smiled happily at me, like a dog when its owner comes home from work.)

When all valuables are in distant clouds.