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Microsoft just issued a second emergency OS update for Windows 11 this month
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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That just sounds like a horrible idea regardless.
I had that idea once. You are right, it was horrible. I learned a lot about myself that year.
It does, but onedrive has a tendency to hijack your user folders, moving them to the cloud and deleting them from your computer unless you opt out (I imagine the idea is that this will exceed the free capacity and you'll be forced to pay for more space to be able to access your files, a good old ransom racket), so you might think you had your PST in your documents folder, but it's actually on the cloud, being crawled all over by copilot...
OneDrive doesn't hold files hostage. It's shitty and misleading, plenty of dark patterns, but it won't let a user go over their storage limit. It'll just stop syncing/uploading new files. And try and trick the user into paying for storage, yes. But it doesn't hold files hostage unless a user pays for more storage, and then decides to stop without downloading everything first.
All cloud storage providers do that.
The average user isn't going to have a PST file at all, forget about where it's stored. Outlook stores mailboxes as .OST files in the appdata folder of the user, and those are not synced by OneDrive. To get a .PST you have to intentionally use one of a few different ways to export mail in bulk from the .OST file.