OneDrive Files Disappeared

My husband updated his computer and the option of backup to OneDrive was on. I personally don't use it. I use GoogleDrive because I can save a lot on there for free and I know for a fact it's there but anyway... He signed on today and all of his files were gone after supposedly doing a backup on OneDrive over the free plan amount. All of it gone. So safe to say, he had to factory reset his computer because he didn't know if any subfolders were taken as well and he wasn't about to give himself a migraine trying to look through everything to find out which ones were gone. 

Safe to say, he won't be using OneDrive again.

Hello all,

I am with OneDrive and SharePoint Online escalations.

Firstly, I would like to let everyone on this post know that I personally relate to losing years of files that have been accumulated and many of which had sentimental value.

I have read this entire community discussion. The pattern I see here is that files have mysteriously disappeared and many people have empty folders and sub-folders. A genuine question would be: "Why leave folders and sub-folders and remove the content?" "Why have my files mysteriously disappeared?"

If you are going to perform what's listed here, please read this entire post first.

I may not have specific answers as many users will have customized OneDrive settings and configurations. There are many variables that come to play in missing or overwritten files. Let's first examine complexity:

OneDrive default folder location is paramount; if you reset, remove, unlink, re-add, "stop using OneDrive", be sure to either zip that entire folder up, or better, create a new folder with a new name and copy all content over to it beforehand. To verify it copied everything over, compare folder sizes and particularly, the total number of files, the total number of folders. To add extra integrity, zip that folder into a zip archive to assure file and folder structure remain intact. This may seem excessive and will take up disk space (depending on how many GB you have, if you are like me, 100 GB for a local back up of OneDrive is a LOT of disk space, but in the long run, it's worth temporarily sacrificing disk space to preserve your files).

After that has been done, (it may have taken a while, but again, it's worth preserving your data), perform a clean OneDrive set up. Exit OneDrive completely and be sure it's really exited by checking task manager. Empty the cloud versions, empty the local versions until both cloud and local OneDrive folder is 0 bytes.

How many devices are setup to access your OneDrive files?

If you have OneDrive set up on multiple devices, choose one device to perform all of these steps on --and do NOT attempt to continue this on another one of your devices --to avoid synchronization conflicts.

Allow some time for your other devices to synchronize until they all match up. I.E. they all show as empty. If there are folders remaining on your tablet but on the primary device they are gone, wait longer or perform a manual sync on the device with folders remaining on it. Allow OneDrive to sync itself up on all of the devices.

Take into consideration whether you have a file or folder open on another computer, say your work PC or mobile phone. If you do, don't perform this reset, unlink, or a remove and re-add your account. You are working to have the same information on every device, and on this step, they all need to reflect as empty. Sign out of all but one OneDrive session if you need to.

After you are positive all information is reflecting correctly on each device or web session, you can then perform your next step of reset, re-link, re-add your OneDrive account. Again perform this on one device and make that the primary device for this step. You may want to exercise additional caution and sign out of all sessions and have only one session open --the primary device.

Next, start OneDrive and go through the set up process. After it says "You're all set", navigate to the locally created OneDrive folder. It should be empty, if it's not, you missed something along the way (or if it's just a few folders OneDrive automatically creates, it's fine, you are still in good shape). If the OneDrive folder under C:\Users\Username\OneDrive has a radical name like OneDrive~ or something odd looking appended to it, don't begin moving your files back over to it; instead, start over with the setup process: Unlink OneDrive, Exit OneDrive, make sure it's not listed under the processes in Task Manager. Delete both folders; the oddly named OneDrive folder and the OneDrive folder. Reboot. Start OneDrive and go through the setup process as stated above.

Navigate to the OneDrive folder through C:\Users..... directory and COPY (don't move) the files over to the OneDrive folder. OneDrive might notify you "Processing Changes". Allow it to run its course. Check the properties of the OneDrive folder (C:\Users...) and make sure the number of files and the number of folders equals the folder properties of the source folder. If there are a few extra folders/files, check whether OneDrive added some of the automatically created folders like "Notebooks". If so, that's no big deal and ignore it.

Next, go to your other devices and allow them to synchronize changes. This may take time but again, it's worth preserving your data. Verify number of files and folders are the same across all of your devices.

You are set!

Moving, Copying, Cutting and Pasting within OneDrive.

If you are like me, you will perform folder maintenance from time to time. Some stuff you will want to move off of OneDrive, others, you will want to organize. Please note that moving, deleting, rearranging, cutting, copying and pasting are actions that can be the cause of losing information or winding up with multiple copies of one file or folder. If you are going to overhaul your OneDrive folders, do this from onedevice. Allow all of those changes to synchronize to all of your devices when you have completed your organization. Synchronization is an often used term that tells us, "let OneDrive do it's thing"; yes, that's true, it also means that you should verify everything has fully synchronized across devices and in the web UI. Why should you be responsible for checking? Because everyone accesses the internet differently. You could be on a mobile hotspot connection and it suddenly cuts out without you knowing, and reconnects. You could lose your signal momentarily, your ISP may hiccup, someone on your network is playing an online game and using up a lot of the bandwidth while OneDrive is trying to synchronize....etc, etc. 

I will follow up a post to this article to go into more depth on Moving, Copying, Pasting, Synchronizing and the mechanisms at work in the way we process the OD service in general.

UPDATE: 12-18-19

We currently have a case open with our product development group where the folders not files, are created; if you have OneDrive version 19.123.0624.0002; try downgrading or upgrading. I will update this community thread when the fix is pushed out.

Thanks Nicole, I appreciate the response and your exhaustive instructions.  But let's face it, too many people seem to have lost files on Onedrive and nobody can guarantee that it won't happen again.  Whether it was "their fault" or not is irrelevant, it just seems to happen too often. 

Fortunately the best solution is also the simplest:  a regular backup, preferably to a local physical drive or possibly to a cloud (other than Onedrive of course, eg icloud, dropbox). NOBODY, including me, would ever have lost a single file by following this simple step. And yes, a fire can destroy one's computer AND local backups, but hopefully Onedrive would not lose the files on the same day too.  :-)

I have lost every thing in one drive also. Has anyone found or heard a solution to this issue.  These files are very important.

Supposedly, you can go to the deleted files folder to get back your missing files.

That didn't work for me. Instead, I took advantage of the OneDrive feature whereby all deleted files are always kept for 30 days. In my case, three weeks had passed, due to being on vacation when the loss occurred, and trying in vain to contact OneDrive support personnel (who seemed to have disappeared).

I was able to go back and restore all of my missing files, since I still had one week left to do it. But since I had lost about 100GB, it took about 20 hours to do the restore. Even then, when OneDrive said the restoration was complete, it still took another 8 hours to actually restore them to my PC. I never really understood why that extra 8 hours was necessary.

Since that time, I've never knowingly lost any files. But the loss occurred during a period when I was deleting and adding many files, and I suspect OneDrive just got confused when handling a huge bunch of files, possibly due to something like a stack overflow, since it had thousands upon thousands of updates to be made.