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I see a few notable ways to account for this:
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Delete all data in OneDrive and uninstall it. It can’t sync crud if it doesn’t exist.
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Do not use a Microsoft account with Windows. Microsoft makes this annoying, unfortunately.
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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. I grew tired of Microsoft’s dark patterns and made the switch. It’s been almost 2 years now. Best decision ever.
Linux did the trick for me. They remove bugs instead of introducing them usually
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Do PC gamers change PCs a lot? Because I’m a PC gamer and I don’t.
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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.
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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.
Are you on an older build of Windows or are you not using a Microsoft account to log in? On new installs by default, your documents folder is in one drive.
Like, instead of C:\users\YourUser\Documents, your documents folder is c:\users\youruser\OneDrive\documents.
3 are old laptops, 2 of which are updated to current windows 10, one is on a crusty windows 10 because of hardware problems. My main desktop got a perfectly fresh windows install when I got it October of last year. All are fully signed in to Microsoft and have access to my one drive. Did I just like roll the roulette wheel of hitting every random edge case where onedrive makes it’s own separate folders or something?
Well I’m not exactly sure which build of Windows 10 or Windows 11 this began, but I do know that this is now the norm, especially on Windows 11 which is what comes installed when somebody buys a windows computer. Or installs windows on a built computer if they don’t specifically have a reason to install 10.
I’ve found forum posts about this issue dating back to 2019. It’s really annoying too because you can’t move the Documents folder out of One Drive without editing the registry.
Windows 11 seems to have converted to everything is one drive whether you sign up or not for it.
I guess I’m just lucky then. The laptops are all old enough that they wouldn’t have gotten hit with factory onedrive settings, 2 were windows 8.1 upgrades and one was an early windows 10 (before the creator update, or whatever that refresh was). And my desktop was just a clean installation from the Microsoft create boot media tool.
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.
Oh, can you tell me how to disable all the tracking then? https://youtu.be/IT4vDfA_4NI?si=9kY3yD5yceifSyq8
Its really not a good OS anymore.
A common problem with windows is that it doesn’t respect user settings. Every update it tries to reset things. It is malicious behaviour.
Same. And while I actually use one drive for my photos, I have it configured to not sync on my gaming PC.
Some of these things really do seem to be luck of the draw. Maybe they run A/B tests. Did you get bombarded with ads on Windows 10? I did. My friends had no idea what I was talking about. I for sure got nagged over and over again to use OneDrive back when I still used Windows, and stories like this one were in the news all the time.
I hear people talk about ads in windows 10 all the time, but I can’t say I’ve ever personally run into them, unless you’re one of those people who calls the “try switching to edge” in your browser settings an ad
On the last few installs I did for a customer, on the first login l, Windows asked whether I would use files locally or use the cloud. Choosing the former doesnct put your Documents an old such stuff in OneDrive. Maybe that’s a Europe thing though…
I also don’t use OneDrive, but instead synchronize everything on my Windows and Linux devices with Synology Drive.
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.
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.
