this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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Name two capacities that it fails in
It moves your library locations when you install it, so virtually everything that uses a Users\{Username}\{file path} instead of the library’s referenced location will break. Oblivion Remastered players recently encountered this, because the game defaults to saving in a hard path instead of a referenced path. If you have OneDrive installed, the Documents folder exists at Users\{Username}\OneDrive\Documents. But the game defaults to saving in Users\{Username}\Documents. But Steam uses the referenced library location. So when Steam tries to back up your saves to the cloud, it finds an empty saves folder.
Second, it defaults to backing up your desktop. Likely because many users just default to saving everything to their desktop. Which means you end up with a bunch of broken/duplicate shortcuts on each subsequent machine you use, because they all get cloud-imported from other computers.
First, OneDrive only moves libraries if you enable backup for that library, something that the user is prompted to approve during OOBE or when setting up OneDrive.
Thing is, library locations are an environment variable. This isn’t a OneDrive issue, using an absolute path is bad software development. The issue you describe is not unique to OneDrive, it also affected users who had remapped their libraries to a secondary drive or literally anywhere other than C:\Users\Username Ironically, the original Oblivion release respects the environment variable path. The same is true for virtually every other piece of software, which is why so many users were confused encountering this for the first time.
Most Shortcuts default to C:\Users\Public\Desktop which is not indexed by OneDrive, but user created shortcuts or those for apps that install to the user account’s AppData folder (Discord, Zoom) will end up on the regular desktop. For those who do want to back up their desktop but don’t want machine specific shortcuts showing up ‘dead’ on other machines, you can created a shortcuts to the Public Desktop that the user can drop their other shortcuts into.
Now explain this to 80yo grandma who uses her PC just to browse facebook, download cute images and post them
In order to be exposed to this phenomenon, this 80 year old grandma would need to have two PCs for that purpose, which is rather uncommon. They’d also need to engage in more activities than you’re describing, because browser only Grandma probably doesn’t have any shortcuts.
I own a repair shop and interact with your average consumer / home user on a regular basis, so making these concepts understandable to them is not alien to me.
As an alternative, though, I have had to explain why leaving OneDrive running and paying Microsoft $2 per month would have saved them a few hundred dollars in advanced data recovery fees or maybe even have any data at all after a crashed head made confetti out of the platter.
I’ve also sent people to check OneDrive.com and have them skip that entire phase of work altogether. Compared to 10 years ago, data recovery cases are increasingly rare in my shop.
It might seem dead simple to you and I, but getting this type of user to manage a 3-2-1 backup themselves is hard work and is no likely to pan out in their favor.