OneDrive is ruining my PC gaming setups | Digital Trends
OneDrive is ruining my PC gaming setups | Digital Trends
Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage service is installed on your PC by default, and it can cause some trouble when playing PC games on multiple devices.
Uninstall it then. 🤷🏻♂️
42I've uninstalled it dozens of times. Uninstalling Windows is the real tip.
But gaming....
32I'm a pretty heavy PC gamer. I've been full time Linux for a decade and it's never been better for it. There's like two games my friends play that won't run due to anticheat, but lucky for me I don't play those anyway. 🤷♂️
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When you set up a new PC, OneDrive automatically starts syncing files based on the Microsoft account you sign in with.
I wish that Microsoft’s cloud storage service was opt-in instead of opt-out.
I set up dozens of Windows machines for users every month. There is literally a page during the out of box experience that prompts the user as to whether or not they want their Desktop, Documents, and Pictures mapped to OneDrive.
The person writing the article and anyone else complaining about this are mashing “next” without paying attention and then complaining it wasn’t set up the way they want.
I actually do use OneDrive for those locations, even going so far as to symlink AppData game save locations over to OneDrive so that everything is the same between my laptop and desktop.
I haven’t had the issue the author describes with AC Valhalla or with Rockstar Games Launcher.
After you set up a new device, OneDrive doesn’t automatically download the entirety of its contents. Files are downloaded “on demand” when the system tries to access them, and I bet that’s what caused the stall the author described.
The only inconvenience I’ve ever suffered from having game saves in OneDrive was with Call Of Duty’s Modern Warfare reboot. The settings config file lives in the Documents folder, so each time I launched the game on my Desktop or Laptop I would have to edit the settings to suit that device.
39I always have issues with The Sims. Apparently EA uses the Documents folder for a lot of temp files. So every time I play The Sims, I get warnings from OneDrive that thousands of files were recently deleted. Because it’s creating and deleting temp files the entire time you’re playing, which are all automatically trying to sync to OneDrive.
Given, that’s mostly an issue on EA’s side; Whatever programmer thought the Documents folder was a good spot for temp files should be dragged out back and flogged.
2Regardless of the OOBE setup: You can just create a local account and also not have the issue.
Anything you do after that is done by your own actions.2
Really, this is the games' fault, at least if they were released in the last ten years. That's how long Documents has been a subdirectory of OneDrive by default. If you've built software that can't handle that gracefully and released it since, that's just negligent. It's not like the windows documentation doesn't tell you places that wouldn't have this problem where you can store machine-specific data.
26I've been complaining about this for years now. Windows even has a library for saved games and some games even used that but for some braindead reason, they just don't anymore (and not many did). My documents folder is useless for documents, which is one of the many reasons I stopped using Windows for anything but gaming.
What's almost as annoying though are games that save to appdata. I have lost so many gamesaves that were hidden in the depths of appdata to windows reinstallations while my documents (and "my games" folder) sits securely on a secondary HDD.
27Also saving my documents elsewhere (where I know and control where I store it)
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I hate it when games save in my documents folder. I use my documents folder for important stuff like my documents. Shove it in appdata or steamapps or somewhere reasonable.
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I can understand how this might be annoying but I’m pretty sure it’s convenient for OneDrive users. Why doesn’t he just disable syncing on that folder? How many times is he changing PC?
18Bought a Win 11 laptop recently (it's now a linux device), and on first boot up there was no way to gracefully decline using a Microsoft account to sign in. Luckily, I was in a hotel and couldn't connect to the wifi without going through a login page, so the lack of internet connection allowed me to set up a local account. In any case, if you're forced to log in with an MS account, OneDrive starts syncing right away. You can disable it, but maybe not before it's already done some damage.
2You can skip the MS account during install, just select the domain join and then don't actually join a domain. You wind up with a single local user that way.
8In addition to what the other user said, you can force it to make a local account by entering a "bad" email address. When I was regularly doing end user reinstalls, id regularly use "fuck@you.com" as my email, and for some reason, that account wasn't usable so it just had me setup a local account.
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I set up a Windows PC for a friend, and he insisted on using his M$ account (bad decision). That caused the Desktop folder (not Downloads, not Documents, just the Desktop) to be stored in OneDrive. So as I tried to load his old PC's Software hive, to extract the windows key, it crashed the PC. No problem, the original hive was still exported on the Desktop. I just rebooted into the boot stick and tried to load the hive there. After searching for the Desktop folder for 30 minutes, I finally located it in the OneDrive folder. And despite it being there, and taking up space, according to dir, it couldn't be accessed, like wtf?
- Who wants to share the desktop, but not Downloads etc? In contrast to the other user folders, the desktop is filled with program links that won't even work anywhere else.
- And why not make it accessible in a live boot? Like, it was obviously accessible to some degree, but not readable somehow? Wtf?
11In contrast to the other user folders, the desktop is filled with program links that won’t even work anywhere else.
As someone who used to work in IT I wish that was the case. The desktop is a catch-all for basically anything that might momentarily enter a user's field of vision.
Application shortcuts, URL shortcuts, broken application and URL shortcuts, PDFs, images, a copy of their child's baby album, a folder that's just called "stuff" where all their actual work is saved, seven different copies of the same recipe for homemade pasta sauce, six empty files named "New Text Document", and a recycle bin full of things too important to delete.
But you can't put anything anywhere else, because they "have a system."
17I feel attacked. Only i do clear my recycle bin frequently
3Don't forget loose .exes
1With the digital realm becoming increasingly important and approaching the physical realm in terms of importance and familiarity, I now consider people who use their desktop for everything to literally be hoarders. It's mental illness. I forgive it in old people but if you grew up on computers and you live like this, this is a clinically significant unwillingness to clean up one's personal space.
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Your mistake was trying to do literally anything yourself. Just sit down and let daddy Microsoft take care of everything for you.
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I hate games that use the base Documents directory. So many new subfolders in there. We need a <Username>/<Machine name>/Games folder instead of <Username>/Documents/My Games or whatever it is called nowadays. At least it isn't <Username>/My Documents anymore. That damn space was a problem causer.
9They use Documents because it’s an easy way to ensure saves don’t persist between users. If you and a sibling both play on the same computer, you don’t necessarily want to be sharing game saves. Since the Documents folder is on a per-user basis, the saves are per-user as well. If they simply saved the games in the Program Files folder, saves would potentially persist across users. And anyone who has had a younger sibling accidentally erase all of their saves knows what a bad idea that is.
2It also allows them to persist after a reinstall of the game or of Windows itself, as the Documents and media folders are (optionally) not wiped when reformatting via a Windows install. For games that for whatever reason (fuckin' Dark Souls 3) don't have cloud saving this is a boon.
2Make it a new personal folder called "Games".
Not the first time MS fiddled with those settings lately.2
You can decline using OneDrive during installation. And after installation you can uninstall it or just disable the service.
That's it.
7Article writer: "I can't write an article on that. I know, I'll pretend I've never used a computer before instead!"
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-19Look, Linux is great and all, and with the ammount of effort VALVE puts into proton, gaming does work very well with it. But unfortunately, particularly when it comes to multiplayer games, Linux/Proton can often not be a viable alternative to Windows. A lot of game developers are working against proton compatibility by using anti cheat software that either doesn't support proton or actively detects and prevents using proton.
16gaming does work very well with it.
...is worth mentioning that gaming on LInux doesn't work very well because middle ware (anticheat and stuff) do expect weird things designed by Microsoft. See this in the case of ACPI:
It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work. Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me. Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something related to this. Bill Gates quote
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By not having the feature? 👌👍
8About ten years ago, I was using a third-party OneDrive client to sync it on an Ubuntu install. It was working brilliantly until daylight savings started our stopped, then it got confused about file times not matching so tried resyncing everything, and then saw the times still didn't match, so made a new file for each file with an added numeric suffix, then tried doing the same for the new files, and kept going until my disk was full. That was a mess to tidy up, and once it was sorted, I had to start the sync program in GMT to stop it happening again.
6By not trying to sneak it onto your system over and over.
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Not once Ubuntu installs OneDrive in a wine-Snap. Then it'll mess up your games and increase memory use with duplicated libraries.
Really, in the end, Linux makes everything worse. Acornsoft is the only way. And Repton 2 and Elite are drop-in replacements for Elden Ring and Starfield.
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