OneDrive Files Disappeared

Anonymous
2018-09-07T20:00:55+00:00

A series of folders are all empty! All of the files are missing. The folders and subfolders are present, but all the files in these folders and subfolders are simply gone. What is particularly odd is that all of these folders have a Date Modified within a very tight range, between 8:59 and 9:19 AM on 8/8/2018:

Trying to recover the files in the OneDrive on-line Recycle Bin, you can see there's a gap between 7/30 and 8/9, where there are no deleted files.

These are very important client files, and we need to recover them. I can't identify anything on our end. Does Microsoft have extended deleted file support?

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-06-07T00:47:44+00:00

    Seems I only got part of your question. But I'll try to answer as best as I can anyway.

    There are two basic ways to retrieve a file that is now missing on OneDrive.

    1. See if you can find it in the recycle bin, and if you see it there, restore it, just like from the recycle bin in the Windows file system. In my case that solution didn't work, as there were so many files in it that it took over a half-hour to simply list them all... and then OneDrive crashed. Apparently it can't handle listing over a half-hours worth of recycle bin files.
    2. Retrieve them via the 30-day backup feature. That's how I got mine back. A really nice feature of OneDrive is that any file that has been deleted is always available up to 30 days after it has been removed from OneDrive. That retrieval scheme worked for me, thank goodness.

    You also could always contact the OneDrive support group via e-mail. But I've had mixed luck doing that. Sometimes they're helpful, and sometimes not. For example, I reported a problem to them back in December (6 months ago), and they promised to look into it and get back to me soon. Still haven't heard from them. I guess "soon", to them, means within a few years.... maybe.

    Good luck. OneDrive is a really good Microsoft offering - when it works.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-10-15T23:29:48+00:00

    Same has happened to me. Luckily I'm making copies to an external drive. What I notice is that those folders that I don't use as much, those are the ones losing data, so I don't notice, until the one day I go into the folder and find like many here describe, that the folder is there but the content is gone!! I love to use OneDrive but this is becoming very concerning. What is going on?

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-09-30T18:20:42+00:00

    If anyone is still having this issue, I've noticed two things about this occurrence after having it happen a few times. The first is the files seem to be deleted due to user's account being removed (say, if an employee left the company), but they had the OneDrive synced to their computer. The other is that the missing files don't seem to appear in the OneDrive recycling bin, but they do reappear in the "Sharepoint" recycling been for that team. It seems as though there's a missing link between the OneDrive and the SharePoint recycling bins.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-07-20T18:52:04+00:00

    Another odd thing that I just discovered, one file I am absolutely sure I created yesterday, has a created date of the day before that. It makes no sense...

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-07-15T22:48:01+00:00

    Do a search for them on onedrive.com and you might have them at some random place.

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