Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage service is installed on your PC by default, and it can cause some trouble when playing PC games on multiple devices.
Do PC gamers change PCs a lot? Because I’m a PC gamer and I don’t.
So this isn’t really a onedrive problem, but rather game creators saving things in places they shouldn’t problem? It’s been a long time since appdata became a thing.
MS defaults your profile to onedrive in Windows now… Game creators are saving it to the users profile (best practice) and MS be doing them dirty.
How else can you drive metrics for increasing shareholder value than shady Implementations that they don’t really advertise. Then you can feed their ML training needs with real world data.
They default to what is called “known folders”, which is things like the documents, pictures, desktop and and other folders (in effect, the bunch of folders that default show in the left side navigation in Explorer)
The Appdata folder is not included, and that is where these save files and configs belong, and not saving there, and using the documents folder instead, is old and lazyness by the debs.
Delete all data in OneDrive and uninstall it. It can’t sync crud if it doesn’t exist.
Do not use a Microsoft account with Windows. Microsoft makes this annoying, unfortunately.
Use Linux. The first games he mentions are Read Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla which both have gold status for Linux on ProtonDB
Realistically none of these should be required, but Microsoft has been driving Windows downhill for years now. This problem can snuggle with the piles of other ways Microsoft has been making their OS worse.
After about 30 minutes of troubleshooting and a reinstall, I finally chased down the settings file for the game — and sure enough, it was applying a settings file that had been synced to OneDrive, overwriting my settings changes each time I tried to apply them.
Any service that defaults to overwriting newer files can burn in hell.
I fell into this trap when I reinstalled Win10 on my PC after I upgraded the hardware. I made the mistake of giving Windows setup my Microsoft login because it seemed like that was the only way forward. That automatically enabled OneDrive sync of my documents folder. Which was bad because I had gigabytes of save game and mod data that I was moving over. I noticed all the disk and internet activity as OneDrive was syncing it. It took a while to fix and there are still side effects in the system.
People keep coming up with new ways to bypass it and MS keeps coming up with new passive-aggressive ways to stop them. They won’t just fully say you gotta log in, they have to be sneaky about it.
Sounds like a skill issue tbh. I’ve never run into one drive trying to grab up my entire documents folder, across 4 separate windows computers and multiple installs. And I doubt Microsoft has just decided to bless me, personally, in this regard.
Most of the biggest complaints I see tossed around about Windows are things that are easily disabled or configured away if you take a small amount of time to look up how to do it.
At worst it’s comparable to the difficulty of switching to Linux, which is the most common alternative people bring up.
I just find this specific complaint to be absolutely perplexing because not only has one drive never just started syncing random stuff, I have to make sure the things I put in actually get synced and aren’t just lest waiting when I close the system. And this is on factory installed windows where I’ve largely not messed with anything.
I haven’t used Windows regularly for something like 15 years, but I’ve helped my wife set up and fix her Windows system and she’s never had an issue with stuff like this. Most of the annoying crap can be disabled quite easily.
I don’t have experience with this specific issue, but then again, my wife doesn’t use One Drive and is still on Windows 10. I actually tried upgrading my Windows partition to 11 but couldn’t because my CPU was too old (Ryzen 1700); I have since replaced it, so maybe I’ll try updating just in case my wife runs into a similar problem when she inevitably needs to upgrade.
I didn’t have the issue in the article, where settings and launchers were having problems. I had an issue where my OneDrive was full and I was getting warnings. I was super confused because I’d never enabled it and was wondering what the hell was going on. It took some time to realize it was syncing and I’d gone over my storage, despite never opting in! It was a PITA to undo something I’d never signed up for. It really had its hooks into my file system.
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Do PC gamers change PCs a lot? Because I’m a PC gamer and I don’t.
So this isn’t really a onedrive problem, but rather game creators saving things in places they shouldn’t problem? It’s been a long time since appdata became a thing.
MS defaults your profile to onedrive in Windows now… Game creators are saving it to the users profile (best practice) and MS be doing them dirty.
How else can you drive metrics for increasing shareholder value than shady Implementations that they don’t really advertise. Then you can feed their ML training needs with real world data.
No, they don’t default to the entire profile.
They default to what is called “known folders”, which is things like the documents, pictures, desktop and and other folders (in effect, the bunch of folders that default show in the left side navigation in Explorer)
The Appdata folder is not included, and that is where these save files and configs belong, and not saving there, and using the documents folder instead, is old and lazyness by the debs.
I don’t actually store any documents in the “Documents” folder, and it’s so obviously a dumping ground for lazy devs.
I see a few notable ways to account for this:
Delete all data in OneDrive and uninstall it. It can’t sync crud if it doesn’t exist.
Do not use a Microsoft account with Windows. Microsoft makes this annoying, unfortunately.
Use Linux. The first games he mentions are Read Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla which both have gold status for Linux on ProtonDB
Realistically none of these should be required, but Microsoft has been driving Windows downhill for years now. This problem can snuggle with the piles of other ways Microsoft has been making their OS worse.
Linux did the trick for me. They remove bugs instead of introducing them usually
Linux did the trick for me. I grew tired of Microsoft’s dark patterns and made the switch. It’s been almost 2 years now. Best decision ever.
Any service that defaults to overwriting newer files can burn in hell.
It’s simple: YOU DON’T HAVE TO SET UP ONEDRIVE.
I fell into this trap when I reinstalled Win10 on my PC after I upgraded the hardware. I made the mistake of giving Windows setup my Microsoft login because it seemed like that was the only way forward. That automatically enabled OneDrive sync of my documents folder. Which was bad because I had gigabytes of save game and mod data that I was moving over. I noticed all the disk and internet activity as OneDrive was syncing it. It took a while to fix and there are still side effects in the system.
In Windows 11 if you have internet access during the initial setup it won’t even let you make a local account anymore like it did on Windows 10.
People keep coming up with new ways to bypass it and MS keeps coming up with new passive-aggressive ways to stop them. They won’t just fully say you gotta log in, they have to be sneaky about it.
Or log into Windows with a Microsoft account
Sounds like a skill issue tbh. I’ve never run into one drive trying to grab up my entire documents folder, across 4 separate windows computers and multiple installs. And I doubt Microsoft has just decided to bless me, personally, in this regard.
Most of the biggest complaints I see tossed around about Windows are things that are easily disabled or configured away if you take a small amount of time to look up how to do it.
At worst it’s comparable to the difficulty of switching to Linux, which is the most common alternative people bring up.
I just find this specific complaint to be absolutely perplexing because not only has one drive never just started syncing random stuff, I have to make sure the things I put in actually get synced and aren’t just lest waiting when I close the system. And this is on factory installed windows where I’ve largely not messed with anything.
I haven’t used Windows regularly for something like 15 years, but I’ve helped my wife set up and fix her Windows system and she’s never had an issue with stuff like this. Most of the annoying crap can be disabled quite easily.
I don’t have experience with this specific issue, but then again, my wife doesn’t use One Drive and is still on Windows 10. I actually tried upgrading my Windows partition to 11 but couldn’t because my CPU was too old (Ryzen 1700); I have since replaced it, so maybe I’ll try updating just in case my wife runs into a similar problem when she inevitably needs to upgrade.
In before linux
did somebody say proton
I didn’t have the issue in the article, where settings and launchers were having problems. I had an issue where my OneDrive was full and I was getting warnings. I was super confused because I’d never enabled it and was wondering what the hell was going on. It took some time to realize it was syncing and I’d gone over my storage, despite never opting in! It was a PITA to undo something I’d never signed up for. It really had its hooks into my file system.