OneDrive Files Disappeared

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.

Hi Picman

Thank you for your answer. 

1. The issue is older than 30 days so some years of photos went lost. 
2. The MS support group seem to be not working and disorganized but with big differences. They ought to go to a more personalized way to treat their customers using normal email so you are not restarting over again every time you contact them. I am working in remote rural areas without network or slow networks. So when I get back into a working area then the conversation is cut off as more than 4 days passed. The digital divide is left even bigger. 

Concluding MS MUST warn that this product is only for persons living with good high speed net works.

I had some strange things happen and just discovered I'm missing 4 months of emails.

It started last week when I opened up Excel 365 to edit my weekly bill pay spreadsheet.  It came up a version from last February.  I reloaded several times before I noted a message along the top of the window.  Something like your login has a problem, log out and log back in.  I did so, and my spreadsheet opened up with the version I had saved the previous week.  I thought all was good.

Today I went to lookup and email in Outlook I received in April.  I discovered that I was missing emails from about Feb 22 2019 - July 10 2019 (hundreds).   I've used Outlook with my domain provider since the 90s, it uses POP3 and has always been set to delete emails from the server after downloading. 

When I checked it today, it was set to leave emails on the server.  I logged into my domain email and sure enough, there's emails on there since July 11th. 

Here's what seems to have happened, Outlook like Excel got a February copy of my email file and started downloading from the server what emails are there.  That's why I have emails from 1/1/1998 - 2/21/2019 and from 7/11/2019 on.

I called support, they took my number to call me back if disconnected, then attempted to connect to my computer to fix the problem.  They got as far as looking at the Account for the POP3 server, disconnected, and didn't call back.

I am at a total loos on how to get my missing 4 months of emails back.  Ideas?  Seems like there's a version of a backup on OneDrive somewhere, but, I don't know how to get at it.

Similar thing happened to me just this afternoon. 

I clicked 'save' before closing a word file of which the saving destination is online at my OneDrive personal account. After pressing save and then close, unusually, a microsoft malfunction report jumped up and I was pretty shocked because nothing was behaving abnormal until I clicked save. I reopen the word document and realised the file was restored to a previous version dated 3 days before, in between I had made important changes to the document. I opened the Version History and found the last saved version was this one that is 3 day old, missing all the changes I made in between.

It was very strange because this morning when I open the file from my OneDrive, all the changes made between now and 3 days ago were saved and present in the document. I had emailed my supervisor just yesterday morning, I thought to check the file attached with that email I had sent -- it turned out that one was also from the older version! It must have meant that at some point the updates were not syncing properly to the OneDrive. But I couldn't find local recovery files either... missing files.

I have OneDrive personal account and I am a mac user. My autosave option is always on. Does anyone have any clue was went on?

Hi Helge,

Sorry for what happened to you.

Since the issue you encountered may have different root cause as Noel’s scenario, I’d like to suggest you post a new thread in our Forum with the detailed information about the issue to get a dedicated support. Thanks for your understanding.

Regards,

Neo

Hi Noel,

Have you restored your data now? Do you still need any help? You are welcome to share your updates here.

Thanks,

Neo