OneDrive Files Disappeared

I keep getting messages to say that I have removed files to the recycle bin - which is not the case - so am having to restore everything each time. Why is this happening and, more important, how do I stop it before I lose something important?

ALL my folders and files are gone. It's as though a new account was created. I had been uploading files to OneDrive since I created my Office account several years ago, but now those files are gone - and not even in the Recycle Bin.

Thank goodness I wasn't relying on OneDrive and have, in fact, been using other FREE modes of online storage, along with physical media.

Anyway, what can I do about this? And how do I know it won't happen again?

Thanks!

I have also lost files.

This is not a safe storage. Hence I need to go back to regular disks. :-(

I think part of the problem is confusion over what onedrive does.   When I say confusion mean user, but partly microsoft fault and also companies that install onedrive for employees without having policy ("we got rid of our backup software - just use onedrive").

All I need is nightly backup.  Our company used to have backup service, it was straight-forward and effective.   This worked so well they decided to get rid of it.

Onedrive is not really backup . . . it is some kind of sync-ing w/ cloud (if you save over a file w/ onedrive one, it gets synced).   It is not clear to me exactly what it does in all situations, and it creates confusing messages sometimes.   The worst problem is that it conflicts with FEA code, so I can't leave it one.   So I have to manually turn it on and off.

I'm not saying that onedrive does not have a role - but I don't see it as good backup package.

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.