14 DAY TRIAL // You probably didn’t see this coming, but Microsoft has made a quiet change to its cloud-based storage service OneDrive that bans any other file system besides NTFS from creating backups in the cloud.
In other words, unless your drives are formatted to NTFS, they’re not able to upload file backups to your OneDrive accounts due to a reason that Microsoft is yet to reveal.
It’s not yet exactly clear when and why Microsoft has implemented this change, but posts on the company’s community forums reveal that the first users spotted it on July 1. The message that is displayed to customers not using the NTFS file system reads:
"The location where you were trying to create OneDrive folder belong to a drive with unsupported file system. To have OneDrive use a different location, click ‘Set up OneDrive’ and point OneDrive to a NTFS drive. To use the existing location with OneDrive, you need to format it with NTFS then click ‘Set up OneDrive’ to configure your account.”
The only workaround
It goes without saying that many users are outraged with Microsoft’s decision to implement such a change overnight, as their devices can no longer create backups in the cloud.
“Add me to the list of EXTREMELY pissed off PAYING CUSTOMERS who got shafted by this sudden change. I'd be ok with it, if there had been communication in advance. But making a change that breaks functionality and without warning... that's not the behavior of an enterprise software company,” one such customer posted on the company’s Community forums.
Microsoft is yet to release a statement on this sudden change, and no workaround is available, though some users have turned to formatting SD cards with NTFS file system to be able to create backups until some guidance is provided.
We’ve also reached out to Microsoft to ask for more details on its quiet OneDrive update, and we’ll update the article when an answer is provided.