A lot of college freshmen, having only used Chromebooks in school, have no idea how to save a file locally. Saving multiple versions and backing up is unknown, and USB drives are foreign to them.
I taught middle school computers for a year in 2021-2022. I showed those kids an old hard drive I pulled from a broken computer. Showed slides of a server farm. Explained exactly where stored data cant be kept and what the cloud is.
I'm still not sure everyone understood.
I've heard variants on this from multiple sources. People assume kids are tech savvy because they're ON the tech, but many of them have been doing everything on touch screens and automatic systems like most mobile phones and tablets. It's even stranger when some of them can write code.
My partner works in tech support and testing for a large company and he talks about this all the time. The young fresh out of college kids often don't know how to use a desktop.
Heck, I have a tech savvy junior I teach-- does all the lights for the school PAC. Didn't know what C Drive is.
I’ve witnessed this with my early-to-mid-twenties cousins. Grew up with all the phones, tablets, and consoles they’ve ever wanted, but never had a computer. The oldest one couldn’t understand that plugging a USB drive on a computer doesn’t automatically transfer all the documents onto the computer.
OneDrive is going to your car to the nearest theme park where you can buy a hotdog from one of the stands and take a picture in a photo booth...I think?
It is. I use them for file transfer sometimes between my desktop and iOS devices. Usually I can at least open Google Drive.
MS OneDrive is like "ya feel lucky, punk?"
I mean, okay, but do you really even have 17gb of work product, much less 5tb?!?
I know I don't even come close to those numbers for work, and I'm certainly not using it for personal files, so OD still has no use for me.
I used to work tech support for a company that used Office/OD for everything and let me tell you I don’t trust that thing to work correctly any more than I can throw it.
Always always always save local copy, then manually save another copy to cloud storage. Always. NEVER trust auto save/sync, ESPECIALLY if it’s OneDrive. I took so many calls from people who’d lost hours of work because OD shit the bed while syncing
A recent change to our group policy has meant that now OneDrive defaults to "Free Up Drive Space" with no option to turn that preference off. There is not a single person who prefers to have shortcuts on their machines and no local copies. I gotta tell everyone how to change the setting per folder.
As a kid you think Hank is a punchline, in your 20s and 30s you think fondly of him as a dying breed, and after that you just hope you're the Hank in your group.
