If you save some files on the desktop or documents, and OneDrive activates it's backups later, it will forcefully move your files to the cloud.

And if you're not a paying customer and have gigabytes of data, it will shit itself midway to bark at you to pay up because your free 5Gb is up.

Now, a normal, regarded dumbass (the target audience) would just pay the tax, but if you have an IQ above that of average coral reef you can take your data back by quitting onedrive, copying everything back, and disabling onedrive backup.

Well we all know OneDrive cost money but like you get 5 or 10GB free, and even then if you go over I'm 99% sure those files just stay on your PC.

But the moving files thing feels real. I remember testing out Fedora one time with a classmate who was trying to convince me to switch, and for some reason, even though I direct all downloads to the download folder, it was in my OneDrive somehow. So when my VM tried installing the iso, it was taking a million years to pull it from OneDrive.

Similarly, I didn't realize my Documents folder was backed up on the Cloud, so I had to find the dumbass settings to turn off backups for documents and other shit besides pictures. This is one of those moments where I understand why Linux users love a CLI, because Microsoft's menus are stupid to navigate sometimes.

The worst offender that I never managed to figure out was my ShareX files. It would save locally, but then switch to OneDrive for no reason, so my config and shortcuts would be lost, and the auto backups would also be lost. I fought with that thing for months, and only gave up cause I moved to Fedora Silverblue, in which Linux unfortunately has no app that is nearly as good as ShareX.

I often see people saying stuff like this that I never run into. I wonder if the difference is whether your OS is tied to a Microsoft account or not. I used an exploit to bypass the account requirement when I set up Windows 11.