OneDrive automatically deleting files from OneDrive folder

I regularly get problems with OneDrive and it really worries me. In fact, it caused a catastrophic problem last week for my main client. We have a folder of scripts shared read-only with everyone from a central OneDrive account. I happened to logon to a laptop that I hadn't logged onto for quite a while and this time it totally trashed the scripts folder. To the level where it broke the shared link and got in a right old mess.

Fortunately, I trust OneDrive so little these days, that my copy of the folder is backed up every 30 minutes to an incremental backup system so I can restore it very easily. It's saying something where I have to implement a 3rd party backup system because OneDrive screws up so often.

Unfortunately the broken share link was more of a problem - had to instruct everyone to manually re-sync that folder.

Not good at all!

I am not aware of the problem having previously been fixed. There have been over 50 responses to my comment of over a year ago in which people have reported the same or similar issues. I believe the problem is something to do with OneDrive attempting to sync across more than one device, failing to do so and then automatically deleting multiple or all folders. Whatever the nature of the issue, it is clearly a serious problem which has the ability to compromise people's data storage in what seems to me to be a completely unacceptable way, which really makes OneDrive not fit for purpose.

I am frankly amazed Microsoft appears to have taken no notice of this. I have been in touch with the Consumer Association of the UK, provided them with copies of the 50 or so emails I have received reporting similar problems, and asked them if they could look into it. However, I am not sure if it is within the scope of their activities to do so.

If anyone reading this has attempted to escalate it with Microsoft and is able to comment on their response (if any), please do.

I'm experiencing the same problems of Onedrive files being deleted automatically when a new and old laptop are both online or coming online. All the newer files gets deleted and ends up in the recycling bin. I don't know how many files I've lost before realizing this, how many newer files have been overwritten by older versions or what mixup is happening between intentionally deleted files and Onedrive automatically deleting files.

Even another Onedrive user that shared a folder with me - files in that folder is getting deleted automatically when the old laptop is restarted. Files can be "restored" and Onedrive will show as being up to date. But as soon as either the new or old laptop is restarted, suddenly it has thousands of files to sync...and deleting restored files. 

I wanted to make clear that this problem did not disappear after the previous October post. 

**UPDATE: I don't have this problem syncing across 4 different PCs, 2 Androids and 2 Macs. The issue is only between the 4th and 5th PC. What I realized is that a Windows Image of the disk was used from the 4th machine to setup the 5th PC. I have a hypothesis since this Onedrive was created from an Image disk, it has some kind of a serial number on the Onedrive installation and the cloud sees both the 4th and 5th installation as the same - and whenever the one is syncing it ends up deleting files from the other one. It still shouldn't happen but maybe that pinpoints the source of the problem. 

I'm curious if any of the other users reporting this problem at any point used a cloned disk or image restore on a different machine?

>I don't know how many files I've lost before realizing this, how many newer files have been overwritten by older versions or what mixup is happening between intentionally deleted files and Onedrive automatically deleting files.

This is the big problem - you don't know if's happened so it can be many days later that you spot it. The OneDrive for Business recovery isn't much use either as it can only restore back to a point in time. Which will lose legitimate changes since.

It's totally unacceptable from a company of Microsoft's standing - they made a name for themselves partially on the stability of their Windows Server platform file services and Exchange email.

OneDrive is a very poor relation. SharePoint document libraries are tainted as well as they use OneDrive to synchronise.

Rather glad that somebody else is having trouble as well as I've reported this so many times and never heard anything that I was beginning to think I was making it up. Which I'm not - same problem happens for all my clients who use Microsoft 365/OneDrive.

The fact that I have to a) run my script to backup OneDrive to my server, b) logon to an old laptop, c) wait for it to cock-up and then d) run the reverse script to restore OneDrive shows the lack of confidence I have :-(

We have reports from one customer at the moment about this.

Interesting what KingFisher_82 said about the PC image, these machines were deployed with WDS but sys prepped before One Drive was installed.

We have an open ticket with Microsoft and are trying to get it escalated.