reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
One speaker claims that Windows includes a piece of malware called OneDrive that will spontaneously delete all files on your local computer without warning. The process, they say, starts when Windows updates to begin using OneDrive, but there is no plain-language opt-out warning. Gradually, it begins uploading everything on the computer to Microsoft servers, potentially tens of gigabytes, which may be noticed only if the connection is slow or metered.
If you later search for how to stop it, you’ll find options to turn off OneDrive backup, but upon returning the next day you’ll find everything has been deleted from your local machine. The desktop is left with a single icon reading, “Where are my files?” When you click it, it tells you that all of your life’s work is now on Microsoft’s machine and was deleted from your machine without asking.
The process continues: you’re forced to download all your files back to your machine, which can be a disaster on slow or metered connections due to the large volume of data. When you then try to delete the files from OneDrive, they delete from Microsoft servers and still remove the local copies, leaving you with nothing on your computer. The only way to delete files from Microsoft’s machine without also removing them locally is to follow a YouTube tutorial with detailed steps.
To make OneDrive stop this behavior requires looking up the exact steps; there is no intuitive, plain-English option to opt out. The speaker asserts there is no explicit notice like, “Hey, do you want us to take everything on your computer and put it on our computer instead?” If such an option existed in plain language, they claim, people would say no.
The speaker argues that many people equate cloud storage with a backup, but OneDrive allegedly does not function as a back-up; instead, it secretly transfers the user’s files to their machine so that Microsoft’s machine becomes primary, and the user’s local machine is treated as temporary access. This allegedly slows down the computer because data is uploaded and downloaded to the cloud rather than read from or written to the local hard drive. In practice, if anything happens to a file on OneDrive’s machine, the file is deleted everywhere, because there is only the copy on their machine.
Throughout, the speaker emphasizes that this behavior is not explained in plain language, is highly unintuitive, and could lead to accidental, widespread data loss. They conclude that it’s hard to believe this was allowed to go out the door or that nobody intervened.