this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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Happened to me at work where they force us to use Windows 11. I had turned on the autosave feature on a Word document I was working on. Little did I know this meant it stopped saving the changes locally and started saving them on a OneDrive copy. I then worked all day on that file.
The next day I notice the file on OD, find it odd that it is there so I delete it because I want nothing to do with OD. I then open the local word file and realize that none of the work I did the day prior was saved.
I figured out what happened and fortunately the file was still in the recycle bin. But fuck that whole system to begin with. It won't even let me use the autosave feature locally.
Go beat your IT department with hammers. I have roughly a decade in IT with primarily Windows in our environment. There's no reason for it to suck so bad in a corporate environment. They can disable it entirely very easily, or make it work amazingly well with some effort.
My workplace:
We redirect/sync My Documents and My Pictures to OneDrive seamlessly. If it's saved in either of those, autosave is on and it's the same file locally and on onedrive. Files saved follow to any machine. Viewable in explorer always, actually downloaded locally on the fly as needed. Obvious overlaid icon on every file to indicate if it's synced, syncing, or not available locally (when you're offline and can't connect to one drive). You can right click files and folders to easily adjust if they're always downloaded up to date locally or just on demand.
If there are any conflicts it can't auto-merge (usually only non-office docs) it saves them with the source computer name appended to the end of the file name so you have each version available, and it pops up a notification that stays until it is manually dismissed, so you know it happened.
If for some reason you're working on a document outside of the synced folders, office programs do not default to saving in one drive, they default to where the document was opened from or to "My Documents" for new docs, so shit doesn't get silently moved on you. I can and have had the same doc opened on multiple machines at once, made edits on each, and it worked just like live collaboration with other users.
It doesn't have to suck, and it's also easily disableable entirely in enterprise environments if your IT doesn't want to configure it well. We kept it entirely disabled from our environment until we had our config planned and thoroughly tested with a pilot group for a few months before we let it hit the company as a whole.
No... then they don't do what I'm talking about. I'm sorry you deal with the suck, but your IT team still gets hammers.
My workplace backs up to OneDrive itself. No requirement of work VPN, just sign in on a work machine with internet connection and confirm the MFA prompt.
Technically OneDrive is some unholy patchwork on top of Sharepoint Online, as evidenced by a ton of back end settings going through the SharePoint admin UI, but that's not relevant to the discussion.
I didn't even know it was possible to hijack Onedrive to point to SharePoint Server. For that matter who in the absolute fuck is still using Sharepoint Server? It went out of support two years ago, and extended support (at significantly extra cost) ends July 14th.
There is technically another On-Prem version past 2019, but it's obvious bare minimum life support.
Plus, Microsoft locks so many of their security and other features baked into Azure behind Office 365 E5 licenses that most places are just using those for Office etc, and those come with a shit ton of storage per-user in OneDrive and SharePoint online.
We also don't have auto-deletion turned on (yet). I've already done what I can to talk my boss out of it, but we will have options to prevent it on specific files and folders, as we already do with email (auto delete past certain age, unless it's in the archove folder. you can set up auto archive rules if you need, but there's rules on max space).
TL;DR- Your workplace does not in fact do "essentially what I described", which is a large contributor to the issues you've seen. Go get hammers and beat your IT staff with them.
Especially the Sharepoint Server shit. That's horrifying. No one should have to even think about touching that. Ewwww.
Respectfully, no they fucking didn't. Having to be on the VPN and deleting shit after 2 years are BAD configs and falls under beating them with hammers as noted in the previous comment.