Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

http://www.myce.com/news/microsoft-onedrive-for-business-modifies-files-as-it-syncs-71168/

by ingve • 12 years ago

229 119 12 years ago

lolnope• 12 years ago

Disappointing, but a good reminder to not trust 3rd party services with sensitive data regardless.

rsync• 12 years ago

  ssh user@rsync.net md5 your/file

... let's not paint us all with the same broad brush ...

natch3• 12 years ago

You may be great today, but nobody knows what tomorrow holds. Therefore, I would prefer:

    ssh user@rsync.net md5 your/already/encrypted/file

clemsen• 12 years ago

If this is true then Microsoft will have a hard time convincing the majority of potential users to switch to OneDrive. Although I can imagine possible use cases altering data without user interaction is unacceptable. What if you had a git repository stored there? (Yes I know this belongs somewhere else but some people might want to do it regardless) Although Dropbox apparently looks at the data to create previews for the Website etc. I have never experienced altered data.

wmgries• 12 years ago

This article is about OneDrive for Business, not OneDrive. OneDrive for Business is for business, as the name suggests. SharePoint maybe slow, but it does have features that users in business like, so having OneDrive for Business behave like SharePoint is fine.

Karellen2• 12 years ago

So must mean it's just like the difference between Windows 8 Enterprise and Windows 8 Home, yeah? It's exactly the same thing under the hood, but the business edition just has a few extra businessy bits bolted on top, or possibly some restrictive anti-features removed? Because that's how Microsoft branding works, right? Right?

Havoc• 12 years ago

Why risk so much user trust in order to tag some files?

marko1985• 12 years ago

Same question for me. I think it's all about tracking if someone steal files from your onedrive and then they can track who stole it... maybe? But as a user of onedrive and google drive i can say that their license agreement on onedrive (normal customer) doesn't assume owning your files, while google drives i think is written that they own your files and can modify it without your permission. At least google say it.

sikhnerd• 12 years ago

Seriously raises some questions around the whole product, and makes me wonder if we can ever trust any other third-party with any sort of "sensitive" data.

Luckily there exists plenty of FOSS options that provide a close approximation of this functionality for me, though I know they will likely never be an option for the type of companies that rely heavily on things like OneDrive.

danbruc• 12 years ago

IIRC OneDrive for Business is not your average cloud storage but build on top of SharePoint (unlike the normal OneDrive). Therefore this might be some kind of side effect due to way SharePoint handles documents and document versioning. It is definitely unexpected behavior but this might be a reason explaining it without bad intent on Microsoft's side.

robododo• 12 years ago

"OneDrive for Business" is a branding disaster, as it creates a completely rational link in people's minds that it's the same as OneDrive. In reality, it's a completely different product that acts in different ways.

Sigh.

nwh2• 12 years ago

With no knowledge of either product, that's a fairly sane assumption.

0x05• 12 years ago

Just like "surface" vs "surface pro"!

aryastark• 12 years ago

It's amazing how wrong companies can get marketing. Take Apple's AirDrop, for example. I spent 20 minutes one day wondering why my iPhone wasn't connecting to my Mac Mini. Turns out, "AirDrop" is two different things by the same company that are similar but completely incompatible.

nickbarnwell• 12 years ago

To expand on that, OneDrive for Business (a product formerly known as: SkyDrive Pro, Live Mesh, Grove Workspace etc.) shares the OneDrive branding (and some? interface components) but otherwise bears little resemblance to its consumer counterpart.

IIRC the Office Org owns the SharePoint client while OneDrive proper is handled by the Windows Services team.

jimbobimbo• 12 years ago

OD4B has nothing to do with Mesh.

ppog• 12 years ago

...and, indeed, these XML namespaces (MS Office and data types) and the CustomDocumentProperties tag are already known to be added by SharePoint, and apparently for well-established reasons (though not ones I understand not being a SP user): http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/30626/why-is-s...

0x05• 12 years ago

It's absolutely inexcusable to modify .php source code files for this though!

Wonder if it would modify files in a git repository in the same way? Good luck recovering from that!

marshray6• 12 years ago

Microsoft employee here, not speaking for the company just my own perspective. I work in Azure, but not on this stuff specifically.

Sharepoint has its origins in managing collections of MS Office documents more so than HTML and browsers. It knows about certain document types and tries to do intelligent things with them. It's not necessarily the tool you would use for serving raw data over HTTP with arbitrary Content-Types. (Given the complex and varied rules by which browsers interpret content, I'm not actually sure how one could even do that perfectly securely short of enforcing separate second level domain names for each and every tenant.)

As an old-school software engineer, we used to say the biggest part of requirements analysis is setting customer expectations correctly. It seems fair to say that the renaming of Sharepoint to "OneDrive for Business" has surprised some folks where it behaves differently from plain OneDrive or from raw BLOB store.

emeraldd• 12 years ago

"It knows about certain document types and tries to do intelligent things with them."

There's your problem right there ....

danso• 12 years ago

Yeah I can completely believe that this would be an unintended technical side effect, a consequence of trying to mitigate some other kind of difficulty that Microsoft's broad userbase might run into. Kind of reminds me of Excel's propensity to helpfully (and destructively) convert dates and zero-padded-numbers upon import.

bananas5• 12 years ago

I've just spent a couple of weeks "unclouding" everything due to a number of problems like this. I was using OneDrive (the consumer one) with an Office 365 Home sub for doing basic personal finance spreadsheets and it decided to literally destroy the contents as it was uploaded and downloaded from one computer to another. I can't really trust it.

I tried Google Drive before and found it unacceptable that it just leaves links to documents on your local disk. I could imagine that in a network down situation I'd be in the shit.

So I'm here with LibreOffice and local file storage only now and all is good.

I don't buy the supposed advantage of these services any more. I'm just going to lump my ThinkPad around and not worry about where my shit is now (it's with me). I'll keep an offline backup at home and one off site (encrypted).

lucio• 12 years ago

Try BTSync

bananas5• 12 years ago

I really want less software to manage my stuff so I'll pass on that.

nwh2• 12 years ago

Closed source with that sort of application is uncomfortable.

dublinben• 12 years ago

Or Tahoe-LAFS, which is free and open source, and much more stable.

borrowedtime2• 12 years ago

Reminds me of a few years ago when I said that I thought it was likely the NSA and GCHQ were able to monitor and then inspect without warrants pretty much anything they wanted on the internet, password or not, and I was ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist. After Snowden's revelations I see absolutely zero reason to trust anything any of these companies say or do. And I would use them all with caution - especially if it's your startup's patent application stored in onedrive.

eitland• 12 years ago

As much as the "new Microsoft" impresses me some parts of the company still seems to believe they can get away with anything. :-/

r00fus• 12 years ago

There is no "new Microsoft". The huge ship has shifted course, visibly, and announced the shift, but that doesn't mean it's completed it's shift, nor does it mean that everyone in the company is completely aligned yet.

While I'm happy that Microsoft is re-aligning with reality, I still don't quite trust them yet. They have a lot of credibility to rebuild.

higherpurpose2• 12 years ago

They'll probably blame this one on an "error" again, like how they did when it was found out that Skype was MITM-ing https links, or when Bing was censoring stuff from China globally, and even in English, and in a couple of other cases I don't remember well right now. That seems to be their boilerplate PR response whenever some big privacy infringement happens and many are outraged about it.

borrowedtime2• 12 years ago

Yea, but of course the microsoft happy bunnies will go on defending them like the morons they are.

marshray6• 12 years ago

I'm interested if you have a cite for MITMing hyperlinks. The only thing I see sounds attributable to old fashioned cookies and ad networks.

varkson2• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure this user is referencing the link checking bot news that came out mid last year. Basically, a Skype bot HEADs links placed in messages. It's hard to say why, maybe it checks for 404ed links.

varkson2• 12 years ago

Bing was censoring stuff from China globally

That's not a privacy infringement, that just sounds like production code went up to the wrong server.

jccooper• 12 years ago

It's almost certainly "accidental" and a relic of some indexing or something that Sharepoint is doing to the documents. I'll bet it recognizes XML-ish content (as the article notes, images and plain text are ignored), tosses it in a validator or something similar that "corrects" the file, and saves that file internally. That's not too unusual in the CMS world. The bad part is that the internal version has found its way back out; hopefully in turning SharePoint into "cloud storage" they screwed up and sent the wrong thing. Otherwise, that's rather a mis-feature of SharePoint. If there's anyone here who actually knows it (I only generally do, being on the OSS side of the CMS world) I'd be interested to know.

So I'm ascribing this to incompetence and/or bad judgement rather than malice. But either way, still unacceptable.

polemic• 12 years ago

Sure, but as a cloud sync product it's a "you had one job" situation. Not so much incompetence as a fundamental failure to achieve that basic requirement.

DangerousPie• 12 years ago

The problem seems to be that this is not primarily a cloud sync product, despite what the name might suggest.

eggnog• 12 years ago

Shocking that so many bytes would be added to HTML files. If you were backing up website views, this could add a lot of bytes per page request if you published them without realising. Totally unacceptable.

kabdib5• 12 years ago

SharePoint has always been a piece of garbage. Unfortunately it's a money making piece of garbage, so there you go.

Inside MS, SharePoint is often used to "track" project documents. Start a project and -poof- your most unfavorite PM has creates a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents in because none of the categories match anything in the actual product. Like, having whole separate doc folders for Beta 1 and Beta 2 (there's going to be a second beta, and the docs are going to be cloned into those? Really?)

PMs: "Please add your documentation to these folders."

Devs: "When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there, and SharePoint is slow and the permissions are always wrong, and a year after the project ships the SharePoint will be destroyed and we will lose all of the documentation." [All of this is true, especially the bit about not very old project documentation completely going away, OMFG].

PMs: "We don't care."

Devs: [check documents into the source tree anyway, and write a mirroring script to copy the things to SharePoint]

PMs: "Stop that."

Devs: "We don't care."

The right answer is, of course, to fire the damned PMs who serially insist on a crappy excuse for a version control system despite everyone else pushing back and saying that it sucked hard. Only saw that happen a couple of times.

kenjackson2• 12 years ago

When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there,

Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.

JoshTriplett2• 12 years ago

Please feel free to teach that to all of the people forced to use SharePoint, who mostly don't know about that. And SharePoint's obtuse interface does not make that particularly easy to discover.

kabdib5• 12 years ago

Except that search was always borked, for various reasons (one really special reason was that search was utterly global, and didn't obey the access rules that were so vigorously enforced elsewhere, exposing details of your Super Secret Project to the rest of the company). So search was turned off, and good luck finding anything. Sheesh.

And getting history out was, to put it mildly, a pain in the rear. Something I could do in five seconds became a nightmare of bad web UI.

Anyway, the devs in my group had a rule of keeping docs in the source depots, and we never lost anything. Poor other groups, we saw them lose important design documents when IT decided that the two year old SP wasn't being used anymore and got recycled. Wow.

Maybe SP does all that whizzy stuff. I just saw it being unutterably stupid, slow and unreliable in practice.

natch3• 12 years ago

Except SharePoint does store history and you can...

It does until it doesn't. Just like "Plays for Sure(TM)," also from MS, worked until it didn't.

mitchty2• 12 years ago

No share point does not store history. Get a file above a certain size, and that magically just stops working.

Every time I've seen share point used, everyone described it the same way. Its where documents go to die.

So far at the current gig a share point "upgrade" has meant that all our fun use of the old install is useless. All of the sudden wikis look more useful.

Burn me once and all that. Oh and search, yeah that search is about as useful as altavista was back in the day.

nl• 12 years ago

Sharepoint has every possible feature, in the sense it exists on a product information sheet. But every possible feature is implemented in such a terrible way that actually using it is more trouble than just about any alternative, including the "rename file to include version number and then email it around" method.

Will someone please kill sharepoint already?

marshray6• 12 years ago

To an experienced software developer, any document management system is going to feel like a poor excuse for a source code control system. But many businesses live and breathe by their documents and workflows the way development teams do their source code.

It sounds like most of your complaints are about the way the processes were managed rather than SharePoint itself.

kabdib5• 12 years ago

Both. SP sucked, and management's use of it also sucked.

skrebbel• 12 years ago

Your comment is witty, but I have absolutely no idea what it has to do with OneDrive modifying files. It's not even about Microsoft or the effects of any of their choices or policies - it's about stupid managers.

kabdib5• 12 years ago

Well, that. Also about how bad SharePoint is, and the kind of people who think that it's okay, when it's not. I wouldn't put my data there because the types of things you run into on SP are endemic and fractally bad.

Maarten88• 12 years ago

... I have absolutely no idea what it has to do with OneDrive modifying files

The article is about Onedrive for Business. Which is nothing more than a Sharepoint Document Library in the users MySite. And that is probably also the cause of the behaviour that the autor is describing: there's probably some workflow or other weird SharePoint feature at work, that was installed or activated unknowingly.

ableal• 12 years ago

a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents

"I resemble that remark". Shudder.

Such fun, a web implementation of a 1980s folder system, with no possible way of doing an "ls -lr". One gets to click every node in a three or four deep hierarchy to look for a document. Shudder, erase from memory.

arethuza2• 12 years ago

To be fair, it doesn't lose your documents, it just makes sure nobody can ever find them again...

mrslx2• 12 years ago

So your PM doesn't manage the docs? as in talk to you about what the appropriate output should be and then they collect and handle the organization of it?

kreeben2• 12 years ago

There are a few PM's out there like that, but most I have worked with are super excited about jira or sharepoint, love agile (as in "look at all the charts, the customer will be so happy when I show these to him") and asks nothing of his team except to follow his guidelines and everything will be swell. Are all unmindful IT people working with MS and MS-centric customers these days, or do you have them on the other side of the fence too?

frik2• 12 years ago

I wonder if SharePoint has a future in Microsoft's strategy re-alignment.

SharePoint (evolved as Office Server) is a beast of software and many awkward engineering & design choices from the 2003 era are still visible to the end user. And I am not even touching the XHTML tabled based layout with thousands of CSS rules, Silverlight & ActiveX controls, bad WebDAV support, "SharePoint Groups", low soft & hard limits for file size, file count in folders, etc.

It has of course also it good values for companies. Like the Office integration, the Office ribbon UI and some document management options that are missing from Windows Explorer thanks to the failed attempt to release WinFS in the Longhorn era.

Microsoft also discontinued InfoPath, the WYSIWYG form designer that is part of Office 2003-2013 and the InfoPath form services hosted on top of SharePoint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_InfoPath

Will Microsoft rewrite (or refactor) SharePoint and its form services from the ground up? Or will SharePoint 2015(?) be a rehashed v2013? And will Windows 9 come with an improved Explorer and NTFS/ReFS with better document management capabilities like that were planned for WinFS or "Microsoft Semantic Engine"?

arethuza2• 12 years ago

I suspect the curse of backwards compatibility might cause a problem - there are so many systems that have dependencies on SharePoint (including a lot of Microsoft's own products). I found this page the other day which talks about the non-trivial process of picking the right API for talking to SharePoint:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj164060%28v=...

The diagram trying to explain how the different APIs relate is a pretty good visualization of the problems that anyone trying to refactor SharePoint would face.

bananas5• 12 years ago

You'll be pleased to know that the work item side of Team Foundation appears to be based on SharePoint and they're heavily marketing that at the moment.

Kill me now.

79523• 12 years ago

> Will Microsoft rewrite (or refactor) SharePoint and its form services from the ground up? Or will SharePoint 2015(?) be a rehashed v2013? And will Windows 9 come with an improved Explorer and NTFS/ReFS with better document management capabilities like that were planned for WinFS or "Microsoft Semantic Engine"?

It would be better to build something on top of Outlook and Onenote. New file systems will only be useful if the metadata survives email which would require email integration anyway.

SixSigma2• 12 years ago

I work in a drawing office at engineering firm that uses Sharepoint. I wish I could even get anyone to acknowledge that there are such things as versions of files. Our backups are destroyed after 72 hours "to save space", emails are copied manually from Outlook to "emails sent" and "emails received" folders in sharepoint.

The cluelessness and lack of interest from either the IT dept. or anyone really drives me crazy. I just get shoulder shrugs from colleagues when I tell them magical tales from the distant lands of version control.

There's may be a case for pushing hard but I'm leaving in September.

SixSigma2• 12 years ago

Sorry to reply to myself but I have worked in a couple of places now as a CAD operator rather than a Devops. I am appalled at how terrible the IT depts. have been at getting involved at adding value to the business. They seem quite happy to sit back and wait to be asked to do things the managers have read about somewhere.

At the current place the only time I even see anyone from IT is when something needs fixing. I can see multiple vectors for real process improvement.

And I think this will be a feature of many IT depts. If you want to make a positive contribution and be known for making a difference rather than being regarded as some sort of Janitor then you need to get out of your chair and, as Taichi Ohno says: walk the gemba. The gemba is the shop floor where things happen and the place where making a difference is something your customers are willing to pay for. Don't be an IT anchor, ramping up equipment costs to stay in place.

bananas5• 12 years ago

Ha you haven't seen the piece of shit that is HP/CoCreate WorkManager then. Not joking but sharepoint is Jesus' sandals compared to that turd. SharePoint is also at very least 20 times cheaper because you don't need a full $1m stack HPUX pile and Oracle to run it.

It only exists still due to cash back handers.

jamin2• 12 years ago

You are using a document management system to manage source code? There is your problem with this 'piece of garbage' right there.

kabdib5• 12 years ago

No. That would be stupid.

sspiff• 12 years ago

My previous employer was switching from just using shared folders and manual versioning (which worked, was accessible, and we had great search tools for it) to sharepoint. Despite almost the entire development floor complaining and objecting to management, their was no changing their mind. My guess is that some higher level exec had a great lunch with some MS salesman.

The result was that next week, people were setting up ad-hoc fileservers and documentation systems to avoid using sharepoint, with half-baked sync scripts to placate management.

mncolinlee• 12 years ago

If you think Sharepoint is garbage today, you should have tried it in '08-'09. I was at a 100% Linux site where management insisted on everyone using Sharepoint and scrapping out old Wiki and source control systems. The rationale seemed to be entirely because Unix admins cost more. We couldn't even browse Sharepoint from our own machines since it was so broken in non-MS browsers that they had to set up VNC to a Windows box. Most people couldn't install Wine either because IT refused to give local root to anyone. The only way to install your own tools as local root was to violate every security principle by bringing your own box and swearing off any kind of support.

I notice that management in most companies has a bad habit of believing IT will put up with awful tools just because admin staff do.

rbanffy4• 12 years ago

Anyone who seriously tries to make a company adopt Sharepoint should be fired on the spot, be it the IT guy, the CIO, the CEO or the chairman of the board. There is no possible excuse for that kind of stupidity.

bananas5• 12 years ago

I took me a while to realise it but yes you are 100% right.

A few years ago I played with SharePoint for a bit and found some good use cases for it. Decided I'd throw some code together that I could wire into it and sell. There was a demand and SharePoint object model was pretty spot on.

4 days later I hadn't even got a bearable working SharePoint installation for doing dev against, had to throw another 4gb of ram at the machine I was working on and wanted to kick the shit out of the thing due to the recursive layers of batshit.

14 days later I had learned python, written the entire thing from scratch using django and had gone live with a client who still uses it today.

MrBuddyCasino2• 12 years ago

I've got some experience in the field as a consultant for a similar product called Alfresco, and I can see why it is such a big success. If there is anything that is much better, I haven't seen it yet.

So: what collaboration tool would you suggest for the average corporate drone to use? And no, git is not an acceptable answer.

slowmotiony2• 12 years ago

Yeah, them stupid people over at Volvo, the Department of Defense, the marines, the army - all of them are clearly idiots! Everybody should just use git repos and use javascript webapps!

yaakov34• 12 years ago

I am sorry you had a bad experience with your PMs, but what does SharePoint have to do with creating categories that don't match anything in the product, or with deleting databases prematurely? Search in internal databases is a very hard problem because of lack of metadata, and in my experience it is not solved any better in source control systems than it is in SharePoint.

And, I have personally found SkyDrive Pro, or OneDrive for Business, or Groove, or SharePoint, or whatever MS wants to call it, very convenient and reliable compared to Google Drive (for which the desktop app tends to quit every hour and leave things un-synced, and which has far worse web viewers).

w124me• 12 years ago

Microsoft is not the only one. I had saved a special PDF with settings to full screen the PDF on open. I uploaded this to my Google Drive to transfer it to another machine and it completely reconverted the file into another type of PDF which not only corrupted the document but also broke the full screen open setting. This is a really random circumstance, but I was surprised to see GD reconvert the PDF, not store what I wanted "byte-for-byte"

jmnicolas• 12 years ago

The full screen bit might has been seen as malware and was "sanitized" by their anti-virus.

sesqu• 12 years ago

Google Chrome used to corrupt certain PDF files if I saved them via the built-in PDF viewer. It still might, I haven't touched that button in a while.

edmccard2• 12 years ago

It's not that OneDrive is modifying files "as it syncs"; it's that it involves Sharepoint, which adds certain metadata to documents that it handles, and has probably always done so; here's a stackoverflow question about it from 2010:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2762841/how-can-i-stop-sh...

EDIT: I see that 'ppog has already mentioned this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7624293

Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

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