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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Do PC gamers change PCs a lot? Because I'm a PC gamer and I don't.
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.
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.
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.
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.