Hands-On Windows 179 transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to look at a potentially important change to OneDrive that I think is going to make people react.
TWIT.tv [00:00:11]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.
Paul Thurrott [00:00:21]:
Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurrott, and if you've been following the show for the past, I don't know, 2.5 years, you might have heard me talk about something called OneDrive folder backup, and mostly in the context of it just turns on even when you tell Microsoft you don't want it on. This is one of the big trust issues in Windows 11, frankly. I know it doesn't happen to everybody, I guess, but it certainly has happened to a lot of people, probably millions and millions of people. It happens to me on every computer I configure, and the way that works is either in the out-of-box experience that you step through when you first set up a computer after you buy a new computer or reset a computer or whatever, or through a notification you might see. Microsoft will try to promote folder backup to you, and folder backup is not a horrible idea for a lot of people. And the idea there is that instead of having local-only folders, meaning folders that are only on your computer for your Desktop, your Documents, and your Pictures folders, and then optionally for videos and music, you could have those things sync, not really backup, but sync to the cloud, to OneDrive. And then if you sign into a device somewhere else or a different computer or whatever, that stuff will sync as well and you'll, you'll have it everywhere, right? And so it's nice.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:37]:
People like me, and I think a lot of other technical people, prefer to store things in their own organizational scheme. And so when I look at my OneDrive,, this, all this junk that Microsoft creates, but I have this Paul folder and I put everything that I need in there. And part of the reason I do this, actually the major reason, is Microsoft, uh, is auto-enabling folder backup everywhere and I don't want these things commingling, right? So I review a lot of laptops. I review roughly 25 or more laptops every year. And one thing I started noticing in late December 2025 is, is something had changed. And I'm not seeing one of the changes consistently, and that's too bad because I spent a big chunk of today trying to make this come up. But there, I've seen two changes. I'm going to demonstrate one of those live to you, and I'm going to describe the other one.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:28]:
So imagine this is a new computer. I just brought it up, and maybe I bought it at Best Buy or whatever and signed in and did my thing, or maybe I reset it. It's an existing computer, doesn't really matter, and you arrive at this desktop., and it wouldn't look like this exactly, right? Because it would be a new computer, but this is my desktop. Doesn't really matter. If you go into settings in OneDrive right away and go to manage backup, you will— I have seen on a couple of computers, but none of the ones I did today, a banner that says, oh, hey, we're going to turn on folder, OneDrive folder backup. And it gives you a chance to actually opt out of it. I don't have enough data yet to prove that this is permanent and it's going to work, but on the couple of computers I've seen it, it has. Hey, Paul here.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:16]:
Sorry for the interruption of my own podcast, but since I recorded this episode originally, I was able to get this feature working many, many times. And I— the day I recorded this, I couldn't get it to work for some reason across multiple computers. So let me just show you what that looks like. And the way that this works is that When you bring up a new computer, whether it's a brand new computer you just opened for the first time and you went through settings or whatever through setup, or you've reset an existing computer, when you get to the desktop, you will see down here in the corner— this, these are screenshots— but is a little icon for OneDrive. And this will originally have a line through it because it's updating. It will disappear, it will come back,, and then it will be a normal icon. And if you go into settings for OneDrive right then, or within the next few minutes anyway, you can get to this Backup Folders on this PC dialog, and you will see it says Getting things ready for backup. And if you hit Cancel, it will never come back.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:18]:
It will actually not enable OneDrive folder backup. So the thing that I've discovered about this since then is that there's a period of time where that's available, and it's based on what you see down here in the corner. It says OneDrive Personal processing some number of files. So in my case, I've got about 900 gigabytes of files. It takes about 30 minutes for OneDrive to process those files so that it can show the stubs in File Explorer. During that time, during that entire time, you can go into Settings for OneDrive, Sync and Backup, Manage Backup, and you can disable that feature. But once this thing completes it goes back to the normal UI, right? So at this point, you have to do what I described later in this video. So I just wanted to show you that.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:05]:
I was kind of excited that I finally got it to work. And, uh, all right, we'll go back to the original video. Now, on this computer, I have actually enabled one folder because I want to demonstrate the other change, right? And the other change is what happens when you discover that OneDrive is backing up your folders. And the way you might do that is maybe your desktop is empty, but because you have stuff in the desktop folder up in OneDrive, all of a sudden there's a bunch of icons on your desktop. That's one of the ways I, I find this is happening. The other thing you could do is just look at your folders, right? So you can see that the desktop folder is not the local version of the desktop folder. It's the one that's in OneDrive. It still has a, you know, a place on the local file system, but it's actually in OneDrive, whereas Pictures is not.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:59]:
And you can see that from here. And I don't have the Documents folder synced. We're going to get to this one because there's some stuff going on here too. But Documents in this case is local, not backed up to the cloud or not synced to the cloud really. Okay. So what I used to do when this would happen is I would go into OneDrive settings and go to backup, sync and backup here, manage backups. And that in that configuration, all 3 of these things are actually going to be checked. And one by one, I would uncheck them and it would be like, are you sure we really, really, really want to back this thing up? Yeah, I'm sure.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:35]:
And then it creates these little shortcut icons because what it's doing is it has moved whatever was in those 3 folders to the cloud, to OneDrive. And when you say you don't want that anymore, it actually— I'm now forgetting because I'm getting the new behavior, but I believe it just leaves the stuff there. So if you were to go to, say, the local version of desktop, uh, it would have an icon there, um, with a link to the version that's up in OneDrive. The, the way that this has bitten me in the past the most is through pictures. Because when you— if like right now, I'm going to— I'll take a screenshot, the screen is going to flash. If I open my pictures folder and go to screenshots, this is the screenshot I just took. I just took that shot right now. And that's fine.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:26]:
This particular computer has 109 screenshots, it looks like. But if this thing gets backed up to the cloud, and I look at my pictures folder up there, I have a screenshots folder here too. Now I've taken the time to wipe this thing out. But this could have screenshots from multiple computers, all commingled together, which, you know, for most people is probably not a huge deal. But for me is a huge problem. I don't want those things commingled. And so that's why I pulled my personal photos out of there, right? I don't want there to be a circumstance where all of a sudden, it's starting to download every photo I ever took to some computer because it decided to sync it. Kind of a problem.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:06]:
But this has changed. And now I'm going to— I'll show you what that looks like. So I've just discovered this thing is syncing. I should show you what this folder looks like too before we go anywhere. In fact, actually, this is probably important. My local folder actually does not exist. So the desktop folder that was in OneDrive was empty. These 4 items— it's 2 files and 2 folders— were locally only on my desktop, but now They're syncing.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:37]:
So I do see them on my desktop. You don't see them right here, but I have a multiple screen setup here. So I do see them on the desktop. I can see them in the folder as I navigate around, right? But what happens when I turn it off, right? So now we get this new user interface. It tells me that how many files are, how much size it is, and I can continue backing it up. It's actually syncing, but whatever. Or, and this is the new bit, I can choose where to keep those files. So the old way was only in OneDrive, and that would create a shortcut link, sorry, up here in the corner that would let me get to those things.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:14]:
But now I can also choose only on my PC. And this is, this is interesting, right? So I'm going to do that. I'm going to turn that thing off. It's telling me it stopped the backup. That folder well, for temporarily doesn't exist. Microsoft's going to recreate it. They can't stand not having those folders. But when I click on desktop now, those 4 items, 2 folders and 2 files are local.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:46]:
They're not taking up storage up in the cloud. Now, how big is this? 2GB. Not too bad. But if you only have the base 5GB of storage, you know, that would, that would have taken up most of the space. And this is none of this is anything meaningful, really. It's just, they're just a couple of, you know, scratch files I'm just kind of working on at the moment. But to demonstrate maybe a slightly bigger problem, let's emulate what it would look like to commingle the Documents folder that's local with the one that's up in the cloud. And to do that, I'm just going to open two windows real quick so you can see what this looks like.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:26]:
So when I go to— I have to go up— when I go into desktop— Documents locally, sorry. So I have a couple of things here related to games, Visual Studio, a couple of other things, right? So these are all app-related files or folders and then files inside. And on this side, when I go into the Documents folder in OneDrive, what you'll see is things that are actually important to me. That's why they're there, right? These three things are programming projects I'm working on. These are some Wi-Fi password things for random locations. Doesn't really matter. This is the keyboard shortcut document I made for one of our previous episodes when I looked at keyboard shortcuts again. And then sometime last year we did an episode about using Copilot inside the Office apps, and this was the fun dinosaur presentation I made, which is obviously super important to me because I saved it.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:13]:
So there it is. So we have Documents local, we have Documents in the cloud. Okay. So if I go into OneDrive settings and I say, actually, I want this to be backed up. Now, this is the type of thing that for me actually does happen automatically without me doing anything. So we save changes. It's backing up my files. That's fun.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:35]:
And what you're going to see is that it has now commingled those things, right, in both places. But really, there's only one place because if I don't want to tell you. Yeah. So now it's the same place, right? The local version of Documents doesn't really exist. It now pushes through to this thing. So up in the cloud, what I have is those two game folders, which is ridiculous. Something related to Microsoft Office, something related to PowerShell, something for Visual Studio, something for Zoom, and then the stuff I actually care about. And they're all together.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:06]:
And right now it's doing its thing to, you know, sync in both directions. It's going to take a while. There's a bunch of files, but you can see how that could be a problem from a file size perspective. In this case, it's not a big deal. If I— these things I've selected here are the folders, the items that were local only before. And if I look at the size, it's nothing. It's just 1.62 gigabytes, nothing. It's smaller than an MP3 file.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:35]:
But you could have a much— this is a fairly clean system. You could have a lot going on. You might actually be using the Documents folder for your documents. God forbid if you have your entire document archive in there from years and years ago. And now it's just mixed up with whatever happened to be on this computer or vice versa. Right. You know, whatever was in the cloud, whatever was local. So that's not what I want right now.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:58]:
The thing is, if I go back to open that again, so now we once again, I have one folder. It's only 81 megabytes. But again, this is just a simple example. I actually have many, almost a terabyte of data up in OneDrive totally. But now I turn this thing off, right? And so we're going to get the same message as before. I'm going to say stop backup. So I get the choice. I can keep that stuff in OneDrive, or I can make it only on my PC.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:26]:
This time, I'm going to choose the only in OneDrive because I'm going to move the other stuff back because this is just, it's freaking me out, even that I allowed this at all. And so give this a second. You can see I have almost a terabyte there., and I will just close that. And now I'm going to get out of this, and I'm going to go and try to see whether there is a local Documents folder. And there is. Now remember, before I had some folders in there. Now I do not, because I've said, you know what, just keep it up in OneDrive, it's fine. I'm going to fix this because this makes me crazy, but I'm going to move that back where it belongs, right? So when I run Battlefield 6 or Call of Duty or whatever I'm doing here, um, this stuff will be in the right place, um, where it's expected, right? Because these apps are going to start up and expect to see this stuff where it's supposed to be and whatever.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:21]:
And so I put it back. But the thing is, remember, depending on your configuration, depending on how much stuff you have, what I just did is you might not be able to do it easily. And I've run into a problem on a computer already where it auto-enabled folder backup, where I tried to reverse it and it was many, many gigabytes and I wanted everything to be local. And I said, well, this isn't going to fit on this computer. Now what? Yeah, now what? Exactly. So I sort of appreciate that Microsoft is taking steps to fix a problem. I feel like they've created another problem. It's not as bad as the original, but it's kind of a 2 steps forward, 1 step sideways kind of situation, I guess.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:04]:
Um, but that's where we're at. So just be careful with this. Um, I've heard from many people who say, look, I've never heard of this problem, it doesn't happen to me. And that's great, you know, that's great. But there are differences between Windows 11 Home and Pro. Home, I believe it just does it automatically out of the gate. I try to use, uh, the Pro version a lot. That, that they'll usually ask you during the out-of-box experience, but not always.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:29]:
I want to say, yeah, two computers I brought up today, it was, it was, I could opt out during that process, but it's still going to enable it later, right? One of the big focus points for Microsoft in 2026 is going to be helping people trust Windows more and trust Microsoft more by fixing a lot of this kind of stuff. And I think this is a first step toward that future. We'll see if they can get it all the way, but The big thing is I'd just be super careful with this stuff because when you start commingling files between the cloud and just one computer, you got to be careful that you don't move everything out of the cloud that you wanted there because then it won't be available elsewhere. And then the size problems too, depending on how much stuff they have and how big your SSD is on your computer, et cetera, et cetera. So anyway, I wanted to push this in front of you as quickly as possible because To me, this is a big deal. I'm glad they did it. It's not perfect. It's important to understand the nuances, but again, two steps forward, one step sideways maybe is the way I think of it.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:29]:
And we'll see if it improves further in the year ahead. You never know. So it's been two and a half years. Anyway, thank you for watching. Thank you so much to our Club Twit members. We love you. We have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about that at twit.tv/HandsOnWindows.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:47]:
H-o-w. You can find out more about Club Twit at twit.tv/clubtwit. Thanks so much.
Leo Laporte [00:16:54]:
I'll see you next week. Hey there, it's Leo Laporte, host of so many shows on the Twit Network. Thinking about advertising in 2026? We host a network of the most trusted shows in tech, each featuring authentic Postred ads delivered by Micah Sargent. Micah, co-host, and of course me, our listeners don't just hear our ads, they really believe in them because we've established a relationship with them. They trust us. According to TWiT fans, they've purchased several items advertised on the TWiT Network because they trust our team's expertise in the latest technology. If TWiT supports it, they know they can trust it. In fact, 88% of our audience has made a purchase because of a TWiT ad.
Leo Laporte [00:17:38]:
Over 90% 100% help make IT and tech buying decisions at their companies. These are the people you want to talk to. Ask David Coover. He's a senior strategist at ThreatLocker. David said, TWiT's hosts are some of the most respected voices in technology and cybersecurity, and their audience reflects that same level of expertise and engagement. It's the engagement that really makes a difference to us. With every campaign, you're going to get measurable results. You get presence on our show episode pages.
Leo Laporte [00:18:05]:
In fact, we even have links right there in the RSS feed descriptions. Plus, our team will support you every step of the way. So if you're ready to reach the most influential audience in tech, email us partner@twit.tv or head to twit.tv/advertise. I'm looking forward to telling our qualified audience about your great product.
