Windows 11 and Windows 10 were recently updated with “Windows Backup”, which has now become a system app. While the feature initially appeared as “optional” or something that could be easily dismissed, Microsoft is slowly getting aggressive with its new OneDrive backup campaign on Windows 11.
Windows 11’s “Windows Backup” uses OneDrive to back up many of the things that are important to you. This may include your credentials, settings, pictures, documents, videos, files, themes, or even audio settings. Microsoft wants the Windows Backup app to become the ultimate backup tool, but there’s a catch.
Windows Backup does not support offline backups and requires a OneDrive plan. By default, OneDrive offers 5GB of free storage, which is why some users do not want to backup their PC. But is that going to stop Microsoft from pestering users? Probably not. In a new server-side update, Windows 11 has started nagging users to try the Backup tool.
Man, they just keep burying their head further. I still have Windows 10 on my gaming PC, and that’s more because I plan on replacing it and will use that moment to transition to Linux, but up until a few months ago I could have been convinced to keep using Windows.
That was until they popped up a full screen ad in the middle of gaming, telling me my PC doesn’t work with 11 but they have great financing options forn a 11 capable PC. Followed by my lock screen having ads of a similar nature. Fucking gross.
That’s despicable. Popping a window up over everything enrages me even when it’s an application I intended to open. Popping up a fucking ad while I am in the middle of something is completely unacceptable. I can definitely see what that was the last straw.
Search for “chris titus windows tool”. It’s a debloat tool that removes such annoyances. It also includes a button that runs the Shutup tool, that disables another bunch.
I’m a Linux user but I use these tools (and massgravel) on Windows VMs to make them behave.
So glad I switched to Linux!
Same. I get a big smile on my face every time I read bad news about windows :)
Wish I could fully… one 20 year old half life mod I play with friends does not work with Linux AT ALL and it’s one of my favourite games.
What game? Love me some old HL/source mods.
The Specialists HD. It’s a game where everyone is The Matrix. There’s bullet time, king-fu, sick flips, and tons of amazing weapons. I’ve been playing for like 15 years. It’s all-but-dead other than my amazing friend who hosts a server, our close friends, and some old-heads. It’s my favourite FPS.
Windows 7 was my last windows. Since then it’s been Linux on all machines. It was easy to see where Microsoft were going. And they will continue to go down this route.
When you run windows, it’s not your computer.
I’m getting tired of Microsoft reading my data. What’s you backup strategy on linux?
Not OP but:
Separate the system and home partition, first of all. The strategies are usually different.
Many distros integrate Timeshift out of the box to create system partition snapshots before every update, and to be able to restore them from the boot menu. Using BTRFS for the system partition makes this even better.
This is usually all that people need in regards to the system, but you can also take regular backups (see below) of things like /etc, the list of installed packages and things like that.
For personal files I prefer Borg Backup because it is incremental, does compression, deduplication, encryption, checksums & recovery.
Borg works with repositories, which can be on local disk, on a removable disk, or remote. If remote, they are tunneled over SSH. It can also export/import tarballs for more exotic scenarios like moving snapshots between different repositories or backing up data to optical discs.
You can use Borg from the CLI and there are also UI apps that make it easier. Pika Backup is a simpler one, Vorta is a more advanced one. I’ve set up family members with Pika and after preparing it for them all they have to do is plug in the backup HDD, open Pika, and hit the big “backup now” button.
There are also online services that support Borg repositories specifically, and for anything that doesn’t you can export tarballs and back them up as regular files, completely transparently from the service.
rcloneis a cli tool that supports a large number of online storage services. You can use it with borg snapshots or you can use it to back up your files directly — it resembles rsync somewhat and can also do encryption iirc.Good writeup.
But why separate /home?
I get that it makes it easy to just grab the home partition in full, but grabbing just your own home folder isn’t any more difficult than grabbing a home partition.
And it makes it really fucking annoying to manage storage between / and /home. You have to pick how much disk space you want for your own things and how much you want for installing things, and changing it later is a giant PIA. The one time I did it I kept running out of space on one or the other.
Separate root fs makes it easier for timeshift. Snapshots are a different beast from backups.
Also makes it easy to install another distro and pick up where you left off with the old home.
If you alocate 50-60 GB for system it should be ok. Things like Flatpak or Steam can put their files in home.
Separate root fs makes it easier for timeshift.
How? I use timeshift. I don’t see what you mean.
Also makes it easy to install another distro and pick up where you left off with the old home.
Sure, but how often do you distrohop? Not worth the trouble to have to potentielly mess with partitions during everyday use.
When I do reinstall, I’ve just copied my home folder over to a secondary drive, then back again.
If you alocate 50-60 GB for system it should be ok.
That’s the entire boot drive on some of my machines. Not to mention that I have gone well beyond that for root on some systems. You just can’t know the numbers in advance, and when you want to just use a system for something, it’s really annoying to have extra steps.
Making home a separate partition makes it really hard to use the full capacity of the drive, should you need to. Which people do need to do sometimes, even if only temporarily.
Doing this might make sense if you have terabytes of storage to throw around, enough to never fill any of your volumes. It has benefits, but not enough to make it good advice across the board, which is why I question it.
I don’t see real advantages for partitioning this way that outweigh the negatives - for desktop usage. For servers having separate home (and/or other dirs) partitions is great, as user fluff won’t kill the ability tor ‘more important processes’ to store stuff. If everything is kept on a single partition, the user is essentially able to DoS the system by filling up space.
regular backups (see below) of things like /etc
There’s etckeeper too.
Btw, etc is for system/default settings.
I don’t store any data on my home machines. Anything important is on my NAS which then gets backed up to Backblaze, and to a NAS as my parents house.
I can wipe my laptop and have apps set up again in an hour, and my desktop mainly stores games I can just redownload from Steam.
simply timeshift backing up the system on ssd. random important stuff, tv shows etc on hdd and backup of the hdd on an external hdd. pictures and other important files also on phone storage.
Automatic system snapshots via BTRFS. Backup to external disk via rsync.
I have a synology NAS with two disks in raid config, where I store backups from the other machines over the home network. So one disk can fail without issues. And I backup the Nas to a hetzner storage box as well. They are pretty cheap. :)
Windows2000 was my last. After having managed to work in IT and using Linux on my desktop, I started a new job last year which required me to use Windows11. I find it quite awkward.
Luckily WSL is a thing.
This nagging + only offering a “Not Now” “rejection” option shit needs to stop. Apple constantly does this too on iPhone and Mac. Umm, I said no to having it or upgrading it, that should mean never bother me again unless I seek it out intentionally.
It genuinely makes my skin crawl — reminds me of being nagged for sex from someone who hears “not now” when you mean “no.”
I think Windows 10 will be the last version I use. As time goes on, Linux seems more and more like a viable option, and I’ll be glad to have control over my PC for once. And who knows, maybe I will no longer have the mysterious freezing issue that’s been plaguing me for years…
I switched over ~3 ish years ago and have never been happier. I recommend Fedora if you want any distro suggestions.
Do all distros have the same compatibility with video cards and software? I want something that’ll run Blender, Krita, Gimp, etc., and support my Wacom tablet. And run my favorite games, of course. Lots of people say Mint is good for newbies jumping ship. I don’t mind learning a new environment and running console commands from time-to-time.
What video card do you have? All distros should work perfectly with AMD cards out of the box, while nvidia you will probably have to install the driver yourself. Nvidia driver support is continually getting better as time goes on though.
Blender, GIMP, and Krita will work out of the box with all distros. Not 100% sure on the tablet so you may wanna research a bit more on that front.
I tried Mint when I originally switched and wasn’t a fan, I distro hopped a bit and stuck with Fedora when I tried it out. I use the gnome version of Fedora and originally installed some extensions to make it more windows like. After a few months I dropped those extensions and am pretty much in vanilla gnome now.
Also sorta unrelated but I also installed the new cosmic desktop environment recently (it’s pre alpha right now) and use it instead of gnome, I like it more than gnome but it’s pre alpha so hold off on that one probably.
The only issues I’ve experienced in recent memory with using Linux is Steam won’t launch properly if I launch it using the steam icon, I have to open a terminal window and type ‘steam’. That launches steam with the terminal, and I have to leave that terminal window open as long as I want steam open.
Whatever distro/de you end up going with will have a learning curve for sure but in my opinion it’s really worth it. I truly think open source software should be the future, and I’m happy I took the leap myself. Good luck on your journey!
It’s an AMD R9 380 2GB, so kind of old. (In fact, it’s factory overclocked, so that might be the source of the crashes.)
I’ll probably just buy a new storage drive so I don’t have to worry about Linux and Windows existing on the same one. It’s going to be great, having more control over the OS. I bet things will even be faster overall, due to the relative lack of bloat.
I switched to Pop!_OS earlier this year and couldn’t be happier. All apps run way faster than they did with Windows on the same hardware. All but one of my Steam games run great (one day I’ll get that last game to work). My “life critical” things are web based, everything else is adjustable.
That sounds promising. I’ve heard good things about Pop!_OS. Which game has issues, if I might ask?
I try to avoid web-based apps when I can. For instance, there is a supposedly great photo editor that’s only available via web browser. I’d hate to become dependent on it and then lose access due to an internet outage, or something.
Sorry, when I said “life critical”, i mean things like email, banking, self-hosted NextCloud for files, etc. For me, everything else is flexible as I don’t have business things that have to run on Windows (that is my work provided laptop), so I don’t have to have the Adobe suite for photo editing, i can use one of several open source alternatives, and all of my hobbies have open source alternatives like Blender.
The only game I cannot get to run is Space Engineers. Numerous other newer and older games work great. To be fair, I’m not an online/multiplayer gamer, so the challenges people run in to due to anti-cheating requirements don’t affect the games I play.
What was really interesting to me, is that I tried Windows 11 Pro and 6 or 7 different Linux distros over several months before landing on Pop!_OS. I mention this because it was all the exact same hardware and so I was able to compare performance in an Apples to Apples situation. There is an obvious application loading improvement. Even comparing against something like Garuda that is supposedly all about performance tweaks.
Oh, I see. For some reason I took ‘life critical’ to mean any program one keeps installed and ‘can’t do without’ ;)
I think Space Engineers is on my list, and it looks like my PC just barely meets the requirements. As for compatiblity, I can always keep Windows 10 around for certain things.
I don’t play anything online either. Last game I tried online was Minecraft, and I just couldn’t deal with the griefers. Some asshats found a way into my area and stole/killed all my cows >:( (Or I was overbreeding and the mods removed them, idk.)
I switched to opensuse tumbleweed about 3 months ago and I have zero complaints. Yast is such a powerful too you can avoid using the terminal for many things, and it being rolling release makes it easier to stay up to date. Plus it comes with snapper reconfigured so if anything breaks you can rollback in about 5 minutes. I’ve had to learn some new things, and a few online games don’t work according to proton db but I’ve yet to run into a game problem on a game I want to play.
I don’t mind learning and using the terminal. From what I hear, it can be used to automate things more easily than on Windows and I’m all for it, as long as it’s not needed for everyday tasks.
I think when I eventually (soon, I hope) get my PC hooked up where I’m at I’ll try either Pop!_OS or Mint.
Thanks for the feedback~
Microsoft will continue ramping up the ads, nags, and dark patterns until everyone is subscribed to their own hardware.
*until everyone stops using Windows. Except for business users, which probably don’t get these nags anyway
Yeah. Then I’ll fill up my free 15gb quota with garbage OS files, and be prompted to pay a subscription to backup the other 1-2tb of data.
What drives me nuts about this is that it always uses the vague language of security and data protection without any consideration that, y’know, they have competition from other cloud providers and self-hosted solutions that do things that OneDrive can’t even do. I guess if you have your backups anywhere else it doesn’t count.
Yeah but they have one killer feature others don’t : shuting up these f**king notifications.
Microsoft is teaching a whole generations to ignore them.
The old days when pairing anything with OS would make US government sue you
It’s the third god damned time I find newly installed MS software doing “something” in the background that I never authorized. I don’t even have Onedrive. I purged that sin from the metal as soon as I had the chance.
I already intend to change OSes. The real question is now if I do it when I decide to upgrade, or in the fast lane. Which is it Microsoft?
Do it now. The more time you give yourself for dealing with it the better. Start dual booting, or on one of your devices. familiarize yourself and transition slowly, rather than having to deal with all of it at once.
I’ve already tried Linux several times over the years. My problems were mainly poor program compatibility and RTX card related driver issues for the latest attempt. At the time I couldn’t afford to change since critical work related programs did not run at all properly on Linux. Albeit that has changed in time. Also, because of the AI craze, NVIDIA has finally shipped decent drivers to linux land.
What prevents me most nowadays is mainly having to setup everything, which I’d rather do once when upgrading the whole system. The Power User moat has been filling over time and the confy guys upstairs are non the wiser.
Is this real life? Is this just fantasy? Why does windows attempt to be iOS?
Because iCloud was a smashing success for Apple when they used this technique?
At least iOS and macOS don’t keep on asking you after you say no like Windows does though. At least not until you change something in your iCloud configuration.
My iPhone reminds me randomly. Google does the same on Android.
When I had an iPhone it had a constant notification in the settings app that could only be dismissed while using icloud. Tbf, I removed most Google apps from my phone, but I haven’t got any pushing to use Google Drive, not from the settings app or anywhere else.
Whats the issue with iCloud?
Why does windows attempt to B-S-O-D
FTFY, with Crowdstrike these days
Didn’t read the article, but Windows 10 did the whole OneDrive backup nag message thing as well. Defender would always shiw a warning that you’re “not secure” if you don’t backup to OneDrive.
Microsoft and nagging? Naaahh, they would never! They would never “hey hello, please please send us feedback!” 5x per day while I’m trying to get work done on that awful offce365. They would never stuff popups all over their sites to continuously nag me about new updates and features and bullshit, they. Would. Never.
I’ve got bad news for you. I found out that if you fill in the survey it still comes back on every click.
We started seeing this pop-up recently, but here’s the thing, my organization already uses OneDrive (unfortunately) but the pop-up just says that they need to contact your administrator to set it up (OneDrive is already setup)
Just means the new backup service has permissions off by default.
Since your company may not want that, enjoy the eternal Microsoft spam forever.
