OneDrive - NoPoint?

Just what the Hell is the point of Microsoft's wretched "OneDrive"?

MS up-dated (so down-graded) my PC from Win-10 to Win-11, replacing their own, long-established and efficient file-handling system with a cheapskate mess, grossly interfering with my filing system and losing a lot of photographs in the process.

It also barred entry to my two perfectly good USB external drives, making backing-up anything difficult. (I will NOT use MS' so-called "Cloud". I do not trust the company.)

Recently MS forced more up-dates on me, and it seems I am by no means the only user to find the latest blocks or loses 'Excel' files. That includes one of mine too important to lose, before I could copy its most recent version. It raises an error message saying it or its location is "read only" (not by the Properties tool, it isn't) or on an unresponsive server.

In trying to recover it, hampered rather than helped by MS' over-complicated, leading-question 'Support' system, I discovered a huge number of my files on something called "OneDrive" - which is not that listed in the tatty side-bar index..

I did not put them there!

Worse, they are all jumbled up, not in basic file-type order, not even in alphabetical or date order.
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I've also had this site freeze itself and whole PC with it several times - again only since the latest interference from MS.

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What exactly are the Seattle Cowboys playing at? Why did they give themselves the right to interfere with your own computer and data so grossly and so ineptly, and to copy or move them randomly to one enormous directory of their own?

I will have to buy a new USB drive compatible with MS WIN-11 and earlier (not cheap) and move all my data to it before the incompetents Gates now employs, makes even more of a mess of them.

I will also need find a professional repairer to recover that spreadsheet and pull back into my control any other MS-lost / OneDrive /Cloud files - not cheap either.

One-Drive? Aye - Drive-One-Up-The-Wall.

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Tastyfrzz · 61-69, M

Go to C/Users/Onedrive to find the folders that stuff is going to now. My son is a leader in an IT company. He's rattling off a bunch of stuff to me that I don't understand.

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@Tastyfrzz Microsoft seems all we users have its expertise too.

This computer gave me gip again this morning, and somehow I found a repair system. Only it wanted me to enter some great long string of letters and numbers without being clear if this was the line displayed under the box, and if offered two enquiry web-sites obviously impossible to use when the computer won't work. Besides, it also turned the keyboard off!

It offered some other options, including a self-repair system. This displayed on a black screen, the 'DELL' trademark and a progress-indicator with astronomically large counts of... something (OS and application files presumably); but this abruptly stopped less than half-way through.

I could re-open Windows, hence typing this now, but can't really recover my data until I have somewhere certain to store them, and I still have one of the most important being inaccesibly "read only", preventing even copying it.

The One Drive folder is a random mish-mash of my data files, but I need be sure that deleting them there will not delete them completely. For I do not know if One Drive is only copies or a direct link system.

I would like to recover everything from MS' clutches and turn OneDrive off, but I don't know if that's possible. It is not in the "Installed Applications" index.

...
The reason I do not trust Mickeysoft is its strange handling of some of my photographs:

W11 used to show an innocuous little weather annunciator that opens Bing and MSN (Microsoft's own News plagiarising service), with a panel of perhaps 16 or 20 link-tiles.

Slap in the middle of them was an untitled, uncredited photograph of a tree. I knew exactly which tree. It is in my back garden, inaccessible and invisible from the street. I had photographed it for an e-post asking advice about its health.

Further searching exposed more of my photos, untitled, uncited, stolen randomly from my photograph directories, and mixed with what might be company trade-marks.

Worse, I could not remove or delete them.

I managed to turn off Bing/MSN but that may only mean I turned off its display to me. I did move my photographs from the standard, childishly-titled "Pictures" to another with its own title, to hinder MS looking for them.

Why would Microsoft do that, if not for allowing others to use my photos without needing worry about copyright or even the simple courtesy of request permission?