Giving In? (Premium)

When I returned from Mexico last month, I had a backlog of review laptops to catch up on (I still do). In the course of configuring each in turn, I ran into an all-too familiar issue, which wasn’t surprising, apart from the odd coincidence of seeing it happen repeatedly, and almost simultaneously on each laptop. I would decline Windows 11’s offer to “backup” my Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders to OneDrive during Setup, but in each case, it would later ignore that decision and simply enable the feature.

This is annoying in the best of circumstances, and it was the trigger for me moving to Google Drive and then, more recently, to Synology Drive, for my day-to-day file sync needs. But when it happens repeatedly at roughly the same time on multiple PCs, and with such consistency, it’s even worse. Normally, I just revert the configuration to be what I want–I typically don’t use OneDrive Folder backup at all–and then delete the lame shortcuts that appear when I do this. But this time, I decided to experiment with something I’d be thinking about for months.

What if I just … left it alone?

In other words, what would happen if I simply gave in to Microsoft’s predatory behavior, as I’m sure so many do, assuming they even understand what’s happening? Would this really be so bad? What if I–gulp–ended up seeing a benefit to this configuration that Microsoft is so eager to have me and many millions of othersd use?

Indeed. What if?

Well, it’s been over a month. I’ve received more review laptops since I started this, and I have seen this same behavior on every one of them, as I always do. I have experienced Microsoft’s preferred configuration now on almost every PC I’ve used over that time. And I have learned something. Or, maybe the better way to put it is that I’ve verified something I already knew. Two somethings.

First, and I need to be clearer about this, OneDrive Folder backup is a great feature, at least in theory. It’s arguably the right choice for most users, and certainly most mainstream, non-technical users. But there are caveats. The most obvious being that it should literally be a choice. I wish that Microsoft could communicate the benefits of enabling this feature in such a way that most mainstream users would understand them and agree to use it. Assuming that’s what they want.

Second, I was right all along. The caveat there is that I should really write that as, I was right along … but especially for me. I don’t personally need or want OneDrive Folder backup. I prefer my PCs to be configured to not use this feature. And here, too, to be clear, that would be true if I were simply using OneDrive all the time for my day-to-day file sync needs, as part of my workflow.

But this isn’t entirely about me. OneDrive Folder backup and Windows 11 are deeply flawed in ways that make this functionality less than optimal even for those who do use it, knowingly or not. Some of this is historical, and tied to the way that Windows has evolved–or at least changed–over time. And some of it is simply bad behavior, or even just bad user experience, that could be easily fixed to the benefit of everyone.

What’s happening here

When you or Windows 11 enables OneDrive Folder backup, three of the folders in your user account’s home folder (in my case, C:\Users\paul) are redirected to the relevant folders in OneDrive (in my case, C:\Users\paul\OneDrive). That is, my Desktop folder is found in C:\Users\paul\Desktop by default. But when OneDrive Folder backup is enabled, that location–which is really what Windows calls a “special folder,” and a specific location in the file system namespace–is redirected to C:\Users\paul\OneDrive\Desktop. If I open File Explorer, manually type C:\Users\paul\Desktop in the address bar, it opens C:\Users\paul\OneDrive\Desktop.

Microsoft works to hide its machinations in the user interface to some degree. It’s horribly inconsistent because it’s not really showing you a hierarchical view of the PC drive’s file system. Instead, File Explorer shows you the heavily edited namespace that Microsoft created. Usually.

Having made no settings changes to File Explorer, I can open the app to its Home view, click the “Up” toolbar button to view what’s oddly called the “Desktop,” view. And here, I see a Desktop folder among the other folders and items. If I open that, it will go to a more typical file view displaying the contents of the Desktop folder (C:\Users\paul\OneDrive\Desktop). The address bar identifies this location as OneDrive > Desktop (in its default, simplified style). But if I click the address bar to get the “real” path, I don’t get that. Instead, it displays “Desktop.” Cute.

But that weird Desktop view that you reach by pressing “Up” in File Explorer also has (in my case) a “Paul Thurrott” folder that represents my user account’s home folder. When I open that, I can see that there is a Desktop folder in there, despite the fact that Microsoft redirected it.

But when I open that Desktop folder, I’m taken to a location that’s identified (in my case) as OneDrive > Paul – Personal > Desktop. If I click the address bar, I see it’s “real” location, which is C:\Users\paul\OneDrive\Desktop.

And then you can, of course, just navigate manually to where the old Desktop folder used to be: To do this, I open File Explorer, select This PC in the navigation pane and then navigate into C:\Users\Paul where I can see that there is no Desktop folder. (There shouldn’t be a Documents or Pictures folder either. But as you can see, there is a Documents folder. And that’s because one of Microsoft’s apps, Visual Studio 2022, doesn’t work consistently with the OS. Hilarious.)

So there are several different Desktop locations in the file system namespace, each of which displays different contents. Because dear God.

A few problems

To most people, this is transparent, meaning they won’t typically notice any of this. They will click on a Desktop folder in File Explorer, typically from Home, and it will display the contents of their Desktop folder in OneDrive. And that will mirror what they see on the actual Desktop in Windows 11. This is just backend shenanigans, tied to file system work done over decades that still involves legacy technologies like libraries. Windows is an architectural dig of this stuff.

But history has a way of biting us in the ass. And the history of Windows includes inconvenient realities like most but not aall theapps we use being legacy desktop apps that still access the file system in ancient, hard-coded ways. And then there are newer, more modern apps, which work inconsistently with the file system in ways too voluminous to count. The result is a hairball of file system inconsistencies on all our PCs. And OneDrive Folder backup neatly highlights some of the worst offenders.

Documents

To see that, all I have to do is open my Documents folder. Which, like Desktop, is synced through OneDrive Folder backup.

The PC I’m using to write this arrived yesterday, and so it’s relatively clean. I bulk installed all the apps I use, as always, configured most of them, and this morning, I picked up this article so I could finish it. And when I look at my Documents folder, I see an Adobe folder, even though I have not installed a single Adobe app. I see a Call of Duty folder even though I’ve not installed that or any other games. I see folders for Graphics, PowerShell, ShareX, and Zoom, none of which make sense on this PC. And two Visual Studio folders because, seriously, Visual Studio might be the worst application Microsoft ever created.

I see these things because the apps noted above are poorly written and they save configuration data–or whatever–to the user’s Documents folder for some reason. There are better and more modern ways to do that, and they have existed for many, many years, in most cases. Maybe I’m taking things a little too literal here, but when I think of the Documents folder, I think of my own documents. And nothing else. But because Adobe (across multiple apps), ShareX, Zoom, and whatever else are badly written, they write content to our Document folders. You know. Where our private documents are. WTF is that?

And what the holy F is Call of Duty doing this for? Call of Duty is a modern game that’s installed through the Microsoft Store. And it writes configuration data to my freaking Documents folder?? What?

When I was using OneDrive extensively and Microsoft started auto-enabling Folder backup, I started seeing these and other random folders polluting my Documents folder. And so I underwent a major change in how I stored documents in OneDrive specifically so that my content, my private data, would not commingle with other content from apps, many of which I don’t use across multiple computers.

But here’s the thing. Mainstream users aren’t going to do this. And as they use their computers normally, like normal people do, those extraneous folders are going to pile up over time. If they use more than one computer, or upgrade to a new computer, all that configuration cruft and whatever else will stay up in their OneDrive cloud storage, taking up space, and then it will sync down to the other PC(s). And what must this look like to normal people? They expect to see their documents when they open the Documents folder. And they do. But it’s all mixed up with this other crap.

Microsoft does all this work virtualizing the file system and manipulating the file system name space and the views of that we see in File Explorer, and it can’t stop this stupidity? Come on.

And I know someone out there, reading this now, is thinking, well, hold on. Maybe this is on purpose. Maybe this is done so that the configuration information syncs between PCs, making the experience of using whatever app better for those with multiple PCs, or for those who upgrade.

If you are thinking that, you are hilariously naive.

What I experience is not this nirvana of consistency and purpose. I experience sync issues. I can’t definitively tie this particular problem to the OneDrive Documents folder and Folder backup, but when I have regular problems when I launch Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and I think it’s because I do play it on different computers. It tries to sync with the cloud first. But in many cases, it fails and then it uses the local data, which I assume is synced to OneDrive. And if it has to access that, and it does about 40 percent of the time, the game forces me to step through the initial configuration of some key controls, agree to its anti-cheating and toxicity pledges, and whatever else. You know, instead of just running normally.

The Documents folder should only store documents that the user created. Period. And that is more important for mainstream users–i.e. most people–than for technical people. But it’s just important. Period. And it is not what happens.

Desktop

This one is a bit more subjective. I suspect that most users save files to the Desktop for any number of reasons, and that the rationale for backing that up (by which I mean, syncing to OneDrive) is that these are exactly the kinds of files that would be lost if something went wrong with that PC. I get that. And, again, for most people, it’s a good idea to sync this folder through OneDrive. Doing so makes those files available from anywhere. Including from a web browser on any device.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that Desktop doesn’t have the same issue as Documents in that I’m not aware of any app that tries to save files to that location by default. That said, there are app shortcuts, including the Microsoft Edge shortcut that Microsoft puts there by default. Not a big deal. But … weird.

More problematically, the Windows user base is as diverse as a user base can be. And everyone works differently. I bet a lot of people save lots of files and/or big files to their Desktop. And maybe that’s not the type of thing one might want synced through OneDrive, where it will just take up space. And have to sync to other PCs, which can take up bandwidth and time and be generally pointless to have elsewhere. Sometimes, a one-off file is on the Desktop for a reason.

In my case, I use the Desktop very explicitly as a scratch space.

Every new document I create is saved to the Desktop by default. If it’s a quick news post, I will write it, publish it, and then move it to an archive folder. If it’s a longer article, like this one, something I may work on over time, I will move it to my To-do folder once I’m done with the initial writing.

I’ll often download an image from the web for use in an article. That does into the Downloads folder, which is not synced, and I open it in whatever application, edit it, and then export it … to the Desktop. As with the documents noted above, my uses of the Desktop is temporary. If that edited image is for a web article, I will post it to the site, and then I will move it to an archive folder. If it’s for later, I put it somewhere in To-do. Same deal.

Here’s what happens when my Desktop folder is syncing through OneDrive. I do the above, and save an image to the Desktop. I Alt +Tab over to the File Explorer window displaying the Desktop folder, or Winkey + D to hide all windows so I can see the desktop and … the file I just saved is not there. I have to refresh the view to see it. Unbelievable.

There are more issues. I’m a human being and so I can be inconsistent. Sometimes I’ll leave files on my Desktop, on one PC (usually), for days or even weeks. When I came back from Build, for example, I downloaded over 20 sessions videos to watch, and I put them in a folder on the Desktop of whatever PC. Where they then started syncing to the web to every single PC I signed in to. And that was a problem. That folder of Build videos is about 35 GB in size. That’s a lot of data to sync repeatedly. It’s unnecessary.

Yes, I could change how I do things. But I feel like computers should adapt to how I work, not vice versa. In this case, I was starting this experiment with accepting Microsoft’s defaults, so I moved the Build video folder to my Videos folder (which does not sync by default) and created a shortcut on the Desktop so I wouldn’t forget about it. That solved the sync issue. But now there’s a broken “Build” shortcut on almost all of my computers.

Pictures

Like Documents, syncing Pictures seems like a no-brainer. After all, this folder might contain some of your most precious memories. No one wants to lose those.

The thing is, most people aren’t story the only copy they have of any photo in a Pictures folder on their PC. Most people are likely using phones for this purpose, and online services for storage.

You know, like OneDrive. Which will commingle your precious memories–your photo collection–with unrelated nonsense like screenshots, various phone folders (like Facebook and WhatsApp Images, which sync there through Phone Link), and whatever else. So this is a lot like Documents, but in a bad way. Your data is commingled with other stuff. That most do not want to sync.

I take a lot of screenshots. I use a third-party app for this, in part to avoid this problem. But I also fire off screenshots using the built-in Winkey + Print Screen shortcut. And those get saved to the Screenshots folder in the Pictures folder that’s synced through OneDrive. And that means two things. Those screenshots pile up. And because they are using the same naming convention on every single PC, the screenshots across multiple PCs are commingled, making it harder to find the right one later.

As I write this, there are 65 screenshots in that folder, syncing across my many PCs. But there would be many, many more, as I deleted hundreds of them in the past month to keep it manageable. Here, the collective file size isn’t the issue. It’s the volume.

Fixing the problem

These are not “me” problems. These are OneDrive problems and/or Windows problems. These are Microsoft problems, problems of its own making. In trying to do the right thing for users–if you accept that’s the rationale for this behavior–it has done what Microsoft always does. It’s not detail-oriented, it doesn’t think things through, and there are consequences. That we have to deal with.

I already explained how I had separated my personal data outside of the OneDrive default folders to avoid some of the issues described above. But that’s too much to ask of normal, mainstream users. This isn’t just a problem Microsoft created and then exacerbated by forcing OneDrive Folder backup on its customers, it’s a problem Microsoft could solve. And should.

There are hints at some of those solutions above. For example, if an app is storing configuration data in Documents, Microsoft should present that app with a virtualized file system namespace that puts that data where it belongs. It could automatically not sync the Screenshot folder and either provide a prompt or a settings interface to configure that. The first time you save a file to, say, the Desktop, it could prompt you to explain that this file will be synced across OneDrive. And maybe have a “Never show me this again” option while we’re dreaming.

The details don’t really matter. What matters is that one size doesn’t fit all, and that Microsoft should not enable this feature without at least alerting users. And if they say no, that should be the end of this conversation. No means no.

Put another way, there is a world in which OneDrive Folder backup can make sense for most users, not theoretically, but literally. The problem is, we do not live in that world.

Don’t give in. Do the right thing. Whatever that is, for you.