This is a problem that has me so frustrated that I am on the verge of moving to Linux, but that’s a post for a different day.

I wanted to write up a public service announcement style post in the hopes that I can deter anyone else from having the same hassles as I did. The culprit in this particular case: Windows 11’s Storage Sense.

What is Storage Sense?

Storage Sense is just a fancy new way for Windows to do disk cleanup. It deletes old temp and app files that are no longer in use, etc. This seems harmless right? Wrong.

Well, on its own it’s not exactly malicious and for those that aren’t aware of temp files it’s definitely handy but there’s a new side to it that is fairly flagrant disregard of user consent. This comes in the form of OneDrive.

What’s the problem with OneDrive?

On the surface there’s no problem, I have 1TB of space on OneDrive that I use to synchronise my documents between devices - but only my documents. Over time OneDrive has become more intrusive, especially since it’s been included with every Windows install. Microsoft pushing their own products, who’d have thought?

Storage Sense + OneDrive = the dangerous duo

I’ve been doing a lot of recording recently for my YouTube channel, this means that there are a few videos that get saved to my C: drive, I’ll eventually move them off to a different drive, in particular when I’m editing them. Overall, between the 5 drives in my PC and the external drive I have a lot of free space, and pretty much all of it is on fast SSDs.

Some of the recordings can take up a lot of space, like my recent recordings of Soulmask, a fun new survival crafting game. These recordings overall took up about 180GB. Combined with my other recordings my drive was sitting at just below 100GB free, somewhere around 98GB, which is not a small amount, but obviously I’d move most of it to another drive soon before I do more recording, only I took too long, apparently.

I booted up my PC on a Wednesday afternoon, logged in, checked my mail and so on, all the while in the background something heinous was happening.

The “low” disk space triggered Storage Sense which went ahead and cleaned out temp files, etc. But then it did something so stupid that I felt the need to warn others of this. It overrode my decision to only sync my documents to OneDrive and opted to sync everything, including the recordings I had made, and my AppData folder.

Not only that but it also went ahead and deleted those files locally to free up space. My upload is decent, so it got through quite a fair chunk of files before I caught wind that something was up. I quickly went to disable OneDrive and then went to check the Storage Sense settings only to find that it’s set to do this by default on any files that are older than 30 days in any of my personal folders (including AppData).

Here’s the defaults for Storage Sense, I urge you to check yours to ensure it’s set according to your preferences:

Storage Sense Defaults

I’ve obviously disabled it since but what really concerned me was the fact that I had set OneDrive to only ever backup my ‘Documents’ folder. I’m still not sure if it was Storage Sense that overrode OneDrive or simply OneDrive going “Eh, why not?” but I never consented to it.

Consequences

The consequences of the above is a lot of frustration, even after disabling the other folders in OneDrive and setting it so all those folders should be available locally, it still hasn’t synced them properly, and I’ll still find myself launching something as simple as OpenTTD only to be told “Please wait while we fetch these files for you.”

Several times when I’m editing videos, DaVinci Resolve hangs for a bit and OneDrive pops up with “Please wait while we fetch these files for you.”

To be entirely honest, it’s such a horrible user experience, but I know exactly why Microsoft did it, all part of them recently pushing virtually every single product they’ve invested in down our throats. Edge, Copilot, OneDrive, the list goes on.

What’s next?

Apart from disabling Storage Sense, I went ahead and disabled OneDrive. An anxiety causing process with the amount of times Windows warns you that you “may lose access to files for good” and the amount of warnings you find online that people had their same files overwritten overnight when OneDrive decided not only to re-enable itself but also that it’s version of files must be newer than what you have.

Sure as can be, the day after disabling it, it had re-enabled itself. On starting my machine it was going through the files to check if there are any mismatches it needs to correct. Fortunately Storage Sense has not re-enabled itself.

I now live in fear that it will pop up again soon and as such I’m constantly checking to make sure my free space doesn’t drop below 5% on my primary drive, even though that’s still more than enough.

Sincerely, I don’t like worrying that my operating system is making decisions without checking with me first. That’s on top of all the stuff I’ve had to disable using WinAero Tweaker (another post for another day) just to make it more usable.

Is Linux the way to go?

I am well-versed in Linux from way back in the day, not to mention that I essentially use it on my MacBook. That makes it a viable option for me. Combine that with the fact that, thanks to Valve, distros like Pop_OS are seeing great compatibility with modern graphics cards and software, and it really becomes a tempting prospect.

If you’re not really well-versed in Linux, it’s difficult to recommend. Windows has stability and user-friendliness going for it. That’s not to say that Linux is not those things but there is a learning curve and there will be times that you find no amount of troubleshooting will fix your installation, and you’ll have to reinstall.

But I shudder to think where Windows is going next. I often find myself booting up my PC to a welcome screen asking me to link my phone to my PC, even though I’ve clicked on the decline button (I have an Apple phone, and this process is strictly for Android).

I’m keen to hear others’ thoughts on the matter, are you fed up with Windows yet? I’ll also be doing another post detailing how to use WinAero Tweaker, it’s pretty self-explanatory piece of software, but one has to be a little tech-savvy to use it.