reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
- The speaker claims Windows includes a piece of malware called OneDrive that will spontaneously delete all files off your computer, not from OneDrive but from your local machine. They say, “OneDrive will spontaneously delete all of the files off of your computer,” and that “all of my photos and videos of my family, all of my work files, everything is gone.”
- They assert there is no warning, no confirmation button, and no pop-up before this happens. It “will start doing it” during a Windows update that begins using OneDrive, with “no plain language warning to opt out.”
- OneDrive allegedly quietly uploads everything on the computer to Microsoft servers, and users may notice only when OneDrive warns that it’s running out of space. The user then looks up how to stop it and “you will get onto your computer the next day to find everything is gone.”
- After deletion, the desktop shows a single icon that says, “where are my files?” They say many people thought they had been hit by ransomware or a virus.
- When the user tries to recover, they are forced to download all the files back to the machine, which can take a long time on slow or metered Internet connections.
- If the user then deletes the files from the local computer and also from OneDrive, the files are deleted from the computer again with “no warning, with no pop up, without anything.”
- The only way to delete the files off the machine without also deleting them from OneDrive is to follow a YouTube tutorial with detailed steps, because there is no intuitive way in the menus. They emphasize there is no plain English explanation like, “Hey, do you want us to take everything on your computer and put it on our computer instead?”
- The speaker argues that many people assume cloud storage is a backup, but OneDrive “secretly transfers your machine to their machine so that their machine is the primary. Those files are the copy of the files.” When you work on the local machine, it is treated as temporary access to those files. This slows the machine because it writes and reads data to the cloud rather than the hard drive.
- Practically, if anything happens to the file on OneDrive’s machine, it’s deleted everywhere because it’s now only on their machine, and you are only allowed to temporarily access it. The speaker notes this is “very intuitive” to accidentally delete everything, and questions how this was allowed to go out the door.
- The concluding point: when OneDrive says it’s full and you delete things to free up space, it deletes them from your machine too, which the speaker finds unbelievable.