This is just bull***t! This post is from 2014 and "suddenly", about a month before people were getting signed out of their accounts this idiot Group Program Manager Douglas replies with this being unlikely? It worked fine, they just did this on purpose to f**k with people using their own operating system and their own file system (but it works fine on android, and I'm pretty sure that is not NTFS).
I just think that Microsoft are a bunch of bullying A**holes and for this I would like to have half of my money back for my office 365 subscription, but still keep office itself (sadly I need it for my studies - I am a paying customer BTW) - I think this is the fair price for the OneDrive subscription. And, with that money I can expand my Google Drive storage because that works fine on ReFS.
Also, I hope a viable alternative for Windows (and Office) comes out some time soon so I can be rid of these malevolent, worthless pieces of s**t people from Microsoft!
But seriously, I guess all we can do is hope that they have plans for fully featured ReFS integration so OneDrive ends up being something similar to rsync.net's ZFS off-site replication service. Assuming MS management doesn't manage ReFS into not being a next generation file system at all.
Odd, google drive definately did not work with ReFS when I set up a new machine a couple of months ago... and OneDrive did.
Anyhow, the solution I used for google drive was to create a VHDX file in the ReFS partition, format it as NTFS and automout it as my F: drive. You just need to make sure it mounts before the Google/Onedrive service starts...
...or not, you might want to Bitlocker it and manually mount/start the service if you share the machine.
Anyhow, viable alternative to Windows? Many people are quite happy with GNU/Linux and Dropbox. I use it myself on another of my systems.
Sorry, I forgot, my Google Drive folder is on my SSD, not on my RAID array (storage space), so I actually do not know if it works on ReFS or not (+ I was kind of mad and still am at Microsoft and haven't double checked). And OneDrive used to work, but stopped now... That is the annoying thing, that it used to work and suddenly I need to reformat - and then the insolence of that Microsoft guy talking about transparency when obviously everything was a lie (that made me really mad).
Do you know if Dropbox or Mega work on ReFS? I will be looking into replacing my online backup with something else now and sadly I am not that tech-savvy to know what VHDX is (I get the gist of it now), how to do it, or time to finagle with it again. Also, the whole reason I have a RAID array is because I played with the partitions on my HDD from my laptop and lost some data and now I am a bit afraid to play with already formatted partitions that have data on them.
I would love to use Linux, but, sadly I need Windows for games and MS Office for Uni (I only have a laptop for portability that cannot game and a new Ryzen PC) and unfortunately for some games I play, Linux is not viable. Also, MS Office has some productivity (at least for me) advantages compared to open source options, but the biggest problem for me are the formatting issues you get if different people in a Uni group use different office versions. I did give Linux a try in the past for about 3 Months, but it did not work for me then.
You could just take all the money you spend for online storage and buy your own local storage options. Yeah it might be more expensive and not as easy but you'll never have to deal with this shit again from either MS or Google.
At the end of the day being your own backup is always better.
It's not for everyone, but definitely worth mentioning. Office 365's web apps work in Linux. That doesn't completely solve your dependency on Windows, but if it's one more barrier you can kick down, maybe it's worth it.
They just want their software on your machine (read: windows & partners, not onedrive). Any sane person knows that sync, be it made by whoever, only care about your files plus the remote details.
I suspect this change is due to MS putting support back into Onedrive for having files that seem like they are local, but are really stored in OneDrive and lets you pull the whole file down on demand. MS removed this feature in 2014, and people want it back...
Basically, if this feature use sparse files, it needs NTFS, REFS does not support them.
If using cloud sync for backup. OneDrive and Google drive are not the best options if syncing from your machine.
Nopetya just hosed stacks of laptops at one of my clients and unfortunately OneDrive synced the encrypted files...
OneDrive and similar can form part of a backup solution, but should not be the only one.
It is not the only one, I have the RAID1 array for redundancy, used to have one drive as online cloud sync and in case of WannaCry or something else, and I also do a weekly backup on an external HDD that is only connected to the system when I do the backup itself. Also, I do not encrypt my files, I don't have any files that are that important yet, they are just important to me
Cloud storage tools like onedrive/dropbox/googledrive etc. have their place. They are useful if you use several machine or need to work collaboratively. Onedrive and google are annoying in that their is no native Linux support (http api's aside) and that Dropbox IMO does a better job of block level replication.
However, if you want a proper cloud backup solution, that costs pennies, and is more secure than a DIY or home NAS solution you should check out TarSnap. You should be able to use it on Windows with Cygwin or maybe the new Linux on Windows 10.
Thanks, this is really good advice, but at the moment this would be too expensive for me, as the data I would like to backup is about 190GB and this would cost ~ 50$ per Month.
