Sims 4 Uploading to Onedrive

[antisocialtater]

I love playing Sims 4 but I've noticed that it's been adding things to Onedrive that I don't know about. There's 1,000+ pictures of random Sims 4 houses I haven't taken any screenshots of, 1,000+ pictures of random sims I haven't taken screenshots of, and other things. Can someone tell me how to stop Sims 4 from uploading to my Onedrive?? It's taking up space. 

[puzzlezaddict · Accepted solution]

@antisocialtater  I've moved your post to the Sims 4 PC tech section.

The easiest intervention would be to stop OneDrive from auto-syncing Documents.  You could still upload content manually of course.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/choose-which-onedrive-folders-to-sync-to-your-computer-98b8...

[puzzlezaddict · Accepted solution]

@antisocialtater  I've moved your post to the Sims 4 PC tech section.

The easiest intervention would be to stop OneDrive from auto-syncing Documents.  You could still upload content manually of course.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/choose-which-onedrive-folders-to-sync-to-your-computer-98b8...

[vladnc]

This is not a good solution. How can we configure Sims 4 to save the files somewhere else?

[puzzlezaddict]

@vladnc  It's a great solution for a lot of people, especially those who like to manually manage their files rather than letting some other service do it for them.

If you're not one of those people though, have a symlink:

https://crinrict.com/blog/2020/02/moving-windows-documents-folder-to-external-drive-via-symbolic-lin...

[vladnc]

@puzzlezaddict Thanks for trying to help, but you are wrong. It's a horrible solution. The OneDrive feature keeps all my documents synched between all my computers and other devices and protects my files from ransomware, hardware failures and other threats. Asking people to disable OneDrive just because the game is buggy and saves temporary files in an incorrect location, then telling them how great that solution is, when it is clearly not, is honestly insulting.

Furthermore, I don't want to move the documents folder anywhere else. It's fine where it is, and it should remain there. Also, creating symlinks in folders under the control of OneDrive is not recommended. This is a bug EA should fix, because they are the ones saving the temporary files in an incorrect location, not me. I'm just using operating system features exactly as intended by the operating system developer, and the game shouldn't conflict with the OS features which are used by millions of people.

But anyway, all this is somewhat irrelevant. I haven't been able to play the game since November, because of the much more annoying food cooking/eating bug, that is still not fixed 4 months later. If you want to help the users, maybe you should contact EA about fixing these old bugs. Maybe a "hero" would have more success convincing them to stop ignoring the bugs hundreds of gamers complain about in vain.

[jpkarlsen]

@vladnc 

You seem to think that these are temporary files but that is not the case, It is userfiles (Saves, Screenshots and other files) that are saved Under Documents as per Microsofts recommendations. This is not a bug but works as intended both by Microsoft and EA. As @puzzlezaddict  mentioned a Symbolic link is the only solution if you do not want to move Documents. If you play other games you will likely have noticed that they also save their userfiles under Documents. Some don't such as Online only games.

[vladnc]

@jpkarlsen You seem to think those are not temporary files, but that is not the case. The game actually writes temporary files in the documents folder, and they are deleted when I exit the game. I'm talking about the scratch folder under the saves folder, which contains hundreds of temporary files. A scratch folder is, by definition, a temporary folder. Apart for causing useless network traffic by synching those temporary files to OneDrive, because it writes them in an incorrect location instead of a location dedicated for temporary files, it also causes causes warnings from OneDrive when I exit the game, when it deletes those temporary files. The warning looks like this:

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_space , if you don't believe me that scratch folders contain temporary files. After working for 30 years in IT and software development, trust me, I know the difference between temporary files and user files perfectly. But in any case, regardles of the name of the directory, since they are deleted when exiting the game, they are clearly temporary files. Which proves this is a bug.

[jpkarlsen]

@vladnc 

You did not mention the scratch folder in your posting and neither did the OP but you are correct that that is a temporary folder.

The correct place to post about that is in the bugs forum where there is a template you can fill in.

[vladnc]

Yeah, sorry, I confused this thread with another related thread, which specifically mentions the hundreds/thousands of temporary files stored there that repeatedly get deleted:

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-PC/thousands-of-Sims-4-files-automatically-deleting-from-...

[sim-scifiguy]

Don't apologize. Its a totally broken feature because they designed it that way, not a "bug". Its bad programming by a lazy company that the could easily fix but they don't. Either you have the game upload gigabytes of data for no reason, or you gimp windows features because the Sims is broken.