Forum Discussion
Why does OneDrive have access to regedit??? Lost my files!!!
At some point you asked OneDrive to redirect system folders like Documents. Those folders are in your user profile path. This has been a normal practice for decades through such Windows features as roaming profiles.
Please get an experienced Windows tech to look at your computer. Your own edits to the system are what is doing damage.
I have never denied that my own edits were one of the causes to the incident. However, again, my edits never caused any damage until I configured OneDrive to backup my user profile folder, which is doing something that is either completely misleading or completely uncalled for. In fact, I've now done a reset of my Windows installation, did the same edits as I've previously done before setting up OneDrive, and right now my system is working flawlessly.
I understand that if you're a Microsoft employee you would like to defend your products, but it would do wonders for OneDrive if we could recognize when something is a potential design flaw that might need some reconsiderations. The damage is already done as I don't actually have any backups, and thankfully the damage could've easily been a lot worse for a few reasons, so getting an experienced tech to look at my PC (even though I wouldn't necessary call myself a beginner at the slightest) would do nothing to help. I'm just here to provide my experience with OneDrive that I can wholeheartedly summarize as confusing and frustrating, in the hopes that maybe this information will provide useful insight for future use.
- I am not a Microsoft employee. You will rarely find them on these community forums, only volunteers like myself who have to do their best with often unintelligble user requests.
Unfortunately " user profile path registry into the cloud or OneDrive's folder path?" makes absolutely no sense. Please take advantage of one of the ample OneDrive tutorials on the net before rambling about the cloud and registry. I've been using these tools sicne the last century and your misunderstanding of the basic concepts is a dangerous thing when turned to mucking about under the hood with your files.
These cloud sync systems have been around for a generation now. If you want to argue about the underlying design of how OneDrive (or Dropbox, Google Drive etc) works then that ship sailed a very long time ago.Admittedly I'm nowhere near an expert on OneDrive, yet your responses merely point out my lack of technical jargon understanding regarding the cloud instead of addressing the actual issue that led to this mess. You clearly understand what I mean by the sentence which you called as nonsense, since I've elaborated on it in my original post. OneDrive asked me a single query; do I want to back up folders like Documents, Downloads, Desktop, etc, into OneDrive? And I said yes before changing my mind. So why would OneDrive edit Windows' registry, so that the Windows' path to what it recognizes as user folders such as Documents, is changed to the one at my local OneDrive folder that's synced to the cloud? Clearly the prompt does something that's completely different from what it proposes the user to be doing.
And that's not even touching the fact that I've followed Microsoft's official guides in their websites to migrate my OneDrive local folder path, yet it somehow still creates a new folder that's in a different path than the one that I've explicitly provided like I mentioned in my original post... If you're arguing that I'm misunderstanding the basic concepts of OneDrive, then you would argue that Microsoft's guide are grossly inadequate.
