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
    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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  2. Anonymous
    2019-08-24T00:57:57+00:00

    Same thing happened to me.  Several folders with important data disappeared without a trace. Luckily I had a backup outside of onedrive and was able to recover them.  I was thinking that Onedrive should be reliable enough to obviate the need for separate backups but obviously that is definitely not the case.  Considering replacing onedrive with other options like dropbox.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-08-23T00:05:33+00:00

    I'm having a similar issue. My work files on OneDrive online all seem missing, but the folders and subfolders are still there, but without any contents.

    While running OneDrive on the PC, it keep creating folders with name "DOCUME~1-[my computer name]-357" and counting upwards, ad infinitum. It starts at 357, and has just been creating more and more folders; it's now at "DOCUME~1-[my computer name]-1104"!! and counting... And the modified dates are all identical: Tuesday, 3:43 AM. When I try and open any of these, it just tells me 'unavailable'. 

    I have the option to restore, but that would mean losing all the work I did today...

    The files are not even visible on the OneDrive on-line Recycle Bin. 

    Update: when I go online into OneDrive and click the affected main folder however, I am able to select that folder and click 'download', and then it starts downloading a zip file (still downloading, 1.8 GB of word doc files to give you an idea of the extent of data). I do hope there are actually files in it (knock on wood), at least the ones I'm unable to access. This would mean the files are there, but not visible for some reason.

    We do use long file names at work, and I suspect this might be why OneDrive suddenly went haywire. Even so, this has never happened to me in DropBox, even with exceptionally long file names.

    I've noticed on occasion that while using Office autosave, the file renames itself with "~" as a means to abbreviate it (I assume), but when I save and close the file, it appears again with the original name in file explorer. 

    It's ironic, since I just decided to make the switch from all other cloud platforms and transfer it all to OneDrive, since it's native to the OS, and I figured that would guarantee better performance and tight integration with all MS apps. Well, after this debacle, I am resubscribing to Dropbox Plus. Something fundamental is very wrong with OneDrive.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-08-20T16:37:10+00:00

    Ahh... MS sucks!

    I used One Drive for the very first time in my life just to store some files as my Laptop had issues. 

    I realized now that it was a blunder.. all my data is lost. All I see is just folders, where the heck are my files?

    Dear All,

    Please help me in finding out a way to recover my files :(

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-08-04T22:32:38+00:00

    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.

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