#cloud vs local

I often say how complex technology has gotten, but I rarely dig into what that means in a practical sense. So instead of reporting on the usual daily array of vulnerabilities and flaws, I’m going to share a personal incident from yesterday.

I’m a gamer in my free time, with Steam as my preferred platform. I bought my current computer back in 2018. It was running Windows 10, and came equipped with the RAM necessary to run the games I wanted, with the OneDrive storage all Microsoft products have these days. I have since upgraded the OS to 11, installed an additional hard drive, and partitioned the original to make better use of the space.

Fast forward to a month ago, when my OneDrive was nearly full and I was getting repeated error messages concerning it. The only option I was given was to upgrade to a paid service to increase my storage. Which frankly, I didn’t want. Call me old school, but I want my files stored and accessible on the actual hard drive of my device, not in some nebulous space I can’t control. So I unlinked my account from the cloud. And voila! Things were running smoothly again with no error messages. Or so I thought.

Yesterday, one of my games underwent routine maintenance. Normal behavior. Then I got a popup from my antivirus software, claiming it found a threat. Okay, not a huge deal. That’s why I have it. Except it wasn’t actually a threat, it was a known bug that makes my antivirus think a crash reporter is malware. Not hard to fix.

Then I noticed the game update had failed. ‘Missing downloaded files’, it said. Again, not hard to troubleshoot. I followed the instructions of a tutorial, and hit update again. The issue recurred. I tried at least three more times to update the game, with no success. I’d reached the point where only uninstalling the Steam client and re-downloading it was going to fix things, because no, I was not going to turn off my firewall to ensure a download. That is an irresponsible option when you consider just how many phishing campaigns start exactly that way.

So, I went into Settings to find and uninstall. Steam wasn’t there.

After some confused noises and swearing, I decided to try and download the Steam client anyway, just to see if it would work. It did. I even saved it in the same location it should have been (the folder itself was still there). No conflict, no alert that I was overwriting anything. 2FA is enabled, so I had to go through that to log into my Steam account. I received an email regarding a login from a new device. Why was this activation treating itself as new when it was in the same location, at the same IP address?

To be clear, the platform had been functioning. I have a taskbar shortcut to the dashboard, and all my games were accounted for and playable. I had no idea anything was wrong until this routine maintenance update. In fact, the last one went off without a hitch, and that was only a month ago or so. I remembered the March Patch Tuesday issue, where some MS Teams and OneDrive logins were failing due to a glitch in the code that told people they weren’t connected to the internet. But that wasn’t the issue I was having. It made no sense.

With my brand new copy of the client downloaded, I moved on to checking my library. Lo and behold, nearly half of my games had updates queued. And the game in question that started this whole mess wasn’t even installed. This morning, with everything finally working properly, I got the missing piece of the puzzle.

Failure to sync with the cloud.

Evidently, when I unlinked OneDrive, a number of save files became inaccessible. They were still present, in the local files. But I had to manually go through each game that had a problem and change them from cloud to local storage. Which begs the question: why is cloud storage the default? And a follow up question: why were only some of them stored there? And most importantly: why did the Steam client not have a local file? The cloud is supposed to be a copy.

I’m the first to say that I work in cybersecurity, not IT. They are separate, albeit related, fields. Fixing this was a mix of online tutorials and a working knowledge from a lifetime of doing my own troubleshooting. But it sheds a bright spotlight on how layered and complex something that should be simple has become. I talk a lot about if/then in coding. Computers have built in redundancies for exactly this reason, but apparently no longer have the commands to automatically revert to local if the cloud isn’t connected. The average user would likely never figure this out without dealing with customer support, that itself might not know how to help.

I’m not sure there’s a moral to this story; it was just a frustrating example of how convoluted dealing with technology is. But maybe it will serve someone else experiencing a similar technical issue. And if that’s the case, then I consider the time well spent.