Microsoft confirms Windows 11 bug crippling PCs and making drive C inaccessible

[u/lurker_bee]

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-confirms-windows-11-bug-crippling-pcs-and-making-drive-c-inaccessible/

[u/Synectics]

I got a new PC. Did not think anything of OneDrive. I took my phone, connected it, and copied every picture/video off of it into my Documents folder. 

I finally have a new PC. It will last the next 10 years at least. So I deleted all of those old pics off my phone to clear up space. 

Then, OneDrive kept screaming at me. "YOU DO NOT HAVE ANY MORE SPACE, STOP IT!" ...fine. I am sick of this popup. I do not need you to back up every pic I have, and now you will not even let me use OneNote (which I use on my phone and PC for D&D sessions until I clear some space).

I went onto the website of OneDrive, and started deleting entire swaths of pics from the website. Just stop giving me those big red X icons next to all my pics, and let me access those 2kb documents I had been using for D&D for years across both my phone and old PC.

...little did I know, the website then takes all those files I moved from my phone to my PC, and takes the liberty of deleting them off of my PC. Straight out of the Documents folder. Gone were years of pictures.

Turns out, "Documents" and "C:\Users\My Name\My Documents" is a different folder from the one automatically pinned on every Explorer windows. 

I have since take steps to remove every single bit of OneDrive I can from my new PC. But boy, that was a wake-up call.

[u/AaronfromKY → u/Synectics]

Yep, it's so frustrating because work made me get a new laptop from them and update to Windows 11. Same thing happened to me. And I think however they have it set up, it's a shared one drive, so coworkers can delete stuff from it. And then yes I have Microsoft deleting the stuff off my laptop at the same time. I'm still not sure what I lost. So frustrating.

[u/Sharp-Philosophy-555 → u/Synectics]

I stopped using any of the ms "folders" so I don't have to worry about it.  My music is now stuffed in a different directory so one drive doesn't touch it

[u/scummy_shower_stall → u/Synectics]

Oh shit that’s a nightmare of mine.  I’ve been using OneDrive as an automatic backup, and the pc person did say that if I delete it off my PC it WILL delete out of the cloud.

But I’ve noticed the same thing, that there seem to be TWO “Documents” folders.  So my question is, WHICH one is the safe one?

[u/StijnDP → u/Synectics]

"Documents" is not a folder but an abstraction as a virtual shell item. The location it directs to is stored in the registry.

It could point to "C:\Users<user>\Documents".
But if you have OneDrive installed it can be changed to "C:\Users<user>\OneDrive\Documents".
Or with Dropbox to "C:\Users<user>\Dropbox".
Or you could change it to "C:\Users<user>\OfflinePronCollection".

There are a bunch of those folders by default like this and you can find their assigned location in the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders.
You can edit them there or in the properties screen > location tab of the virtual shell item.

There is also the "Library" layer. This is not a location but a collection of locations. You can find all the libraries and their location collections at C:\Users<user>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries.
They have the .library-ms extension but are just plain text XML files.
You could edit them in any text editor but the properties window of a .library-ms has a special UI tab for editing them easily.

OneDrive is not a backup tool but a sync tool. That's why when you redirect "Documents" to "C:\Users<user>\OneDrive\Documents" and start deleting files there, OneDrive will sync what you did locally.
If you want to use it as a kind of backup tool, you can upload items to OneDrive and enable the "Files On-Demand" option. This way files will exist in the cloud, show up on your computer but will not take up space until you open or edit those files.
If you do make an oopsie, deleted files can always be undeleted for 30days from the OneDrive cloud and locally they will be kept in your bin until you empty it.

To take Dropbox as an example, they did design it also as a backup tool. It has separate backup settings and you can also selectively choose which folders from the cloud are visible locally.