During the development of Windows 8, the idea of automatically backing up your data into your Microsoft Account and your OneDrive account began gaining traction. The Microsoft Store would remember what apps you had installed on which computers, and your Documents would be backed up on OneDrive, and the system would back up your settings onto your OneDrive account. If you got a new computer, you could ask that the system auto-install the apps you had, recover its settings from your most recent backup, and sync your documents from your OneDrive account. Your new computer would be all ready to go, with all your data, and set up exactly the way you liked it.
For some reason, the scenario was always described as “dropping your tablet in the pool” and setting up its replacement. It seems there was a lot of dropping of tablets in the swimming pool back in the day. Personally, I would just be more careful around swimming pools.
This example exhibits some of the Redmond Reality Distortion Field, wherein it is considered a common activity to lounge by the pool with a tablet PC. This presupposes that you own a pool (fancy), or that you go on vacation to a place that has a pool (fancy), or that you regularly go to the local pool (less fancy but still a little fancy).
Nobody ever considers the probably-much-more-likely scenario of “You accidentally drop your tablet PC and it’s broken.” Maybe because that would be an indictment of the fragility of tablet PCs? Whereas nobody expects a tablet PC to survive a dip in the pool.
A tablet falling in a pool may still be recoverable.
Once I used the hypothetical scenario of “if the user laptop falls into an active volcano” to illustrate full data loss case.
This was a fine feature until it was turned on by default, with no opportunity to opt in or out on new installs or new computers.
As though we all only have one machine, with one use case, and want everything synchronized across those contexts.
I don’t have to imagine dropping tablets in pools, weather they be electronic devices or chlorine/bromine tablets. I do imagine myself having my own pool…
You say that, but I went on a cruise at Halong Bay a few years back — and one of my fellow tourists did indeed drop their phone during a kayaking exercise, right to the bottom of the bay… taking with it a substantial part of their holiday photos, since they didn’t have cloud syncing enabled.
Well, for regular notebooks usually taking the HDD out of the old one and connecting it through a few dollars adapter as an external HDD usually works. HDDs don’t die immediately, and everything useful just gets copied to multiple storage devices anyway, ’cause, well, it’s something of use and in use.
As for tablets and other funny stuff for nothing serious, amount of useful data is extremely small, and if it is useful, it is available somewhere else anyway, for the same reason as mentioned above.
And really useful data related to work should not be uploaded anywhere online anyway. So, what’s...
I know I’m getting old because when I read the title, I thought of chlorine tablets.
I thought “why would anyone drop their medication into the pool?”, which may because I am German, and what is usually called a “pill” in English is called a “Tablette” in German (while we have the word “Pille” as well, it is usually understood to mean “oral contraceptive”).
I’ve often heard this called the “mud puddle test” in the context of mobile phones. If you drop your phone in a mud puddle and it breaks/becomes inoperable, can you still get your account/data back? It’s particularly relevant in the context of things like encrypted messaging apps, where the encryption keys might be stored on-device.
Dropping one’s phone in a mud puddle while out and about seems like a much more likely scenario than dropping it in a pool. Although dropping one’s tablet PC in a mud puddle seems a bit unlikely, too.
The better solution is to get a water-resistant tablet PC.
While we're at it, I'm not a fan of the roaming mechanism provided in most OSes --- there's almost never a way for a user to force synchronization, except for scratching your head while staring at two devices connected to the Internet and hope luck strikes. Bad if they decided to do nothing because battery, although the only thing the user can do, in certain scenarios, is to see the battery slowly drain without doing anything if sync never happens. Worse if they think they're synched. OneNote is a great example...
It’s kind of like the “How do we ensure we have continuity if team member X is hit by a bus?”
Then again… as someone who does not live in Redmond but rather in Arizona where swimming pools are probably more common… it’s not an unreasonable scenario!
So, no chance to stop using some junk by forgetting to install it and later realizing it hasn’t been needed for years? Transferring all the garbage from your documents folders, including the mess in naming, folder structure, to the brand new device?
Can it even be useful ever? I remember trying to cut out the stupid OneDrive from Win10 LTSB, was glad when LTSC stopped installing it by default. If I want to upload some files to a ”cloud”, I can always use my browser, no special cr@ppy software required.
I’ve always thought of it as an evocative metaphor. The real scenario doesn’t have to involve any kind of pool, but the mental image of dropping into a pool is staggering enough that everyone would immediately understand why the feature is useful without needing any other explanation.
How is that different from a single device that keeps working? Personally I wouldn’t consider “oops I accidentally lost or broke my device so now I have to start over” to be a good time to clean up old cruft, but whatever floats your boat.
Do you keep backups at all? If so then you already understand how OneDrive can be useful.
Even with the “application store” synchronization,there are lots of little tweaks that aren’t synchronized. I know as a developer I have “special needs” and as a primarily Linux and macOS user it is always very clear that Windows machines require more configuration and tweaking, for myself at least, than the other operating systems.
However, the increasing “web desktop” feature creep and additional alerts, pop-ups, feeds, announcements, etc across all operating systems has increasingly become a common annoyance.
There's more nuance than "every file on my computer is a naked selfie". There are no privacy or security concerns with storing some hobby projects and purchase receipts that I don't want to lose. Cutting out all of "cloud" is throwing out the baby with the bath water. You can also encrypt them yourself before uploading, if it's such a big concern.
I also believe cloud providers will have much better opsec than myself. If you believe you're more immune to social engineering and 0-days than professionals whose job is to do this every day and have...
OneDrive = Cloud Storage = a hard drive on a computer on Microsoft’s network.
I’m not ok with storing all my personal and private data on someone else’s computer, but whatever floats your boat.
Just keep in mind that your personal and private data is only as secure as the next 0-day or a social-engineering attack on the cloud provider’s systems.