OneDrive replaces newer versions of files with old versions

Yes, I had the same experience when booting up a laptop that had been dormant for a couple of months...old file version uploaded and two months of work lost. Restoring earlier versions didn't work for the reasons everyone has repeated over and over. Now, every time I work on an Excel file in Office 365 I make my edits, save/synch to One Drive, and then save a copy of the newly edited file on an external drive. I pray that the One Drive developers never write code that searches and destroys every copy of a newly edited file across every connect drive (hmmm..., maybe I need to disconnect the external drive every time I save a copy of the Office file on it, just to be safe). I now am considering booting all of my old laptops far from my router and any stray internet connection, and deleting every Office file from the machines. Maybe having one (and only one) computer accessing One Drive will prevent my new files from being overwritten. Next, I'll have to figure out whether it makes sense subscribing to a service that promises one thing, and delivers another.

I have the same issue! I just started using OneDrive the other day (suggestion by IT as a precaution after the power board died on my old comp) and synced everything on my work computer. Today, I used my work laptop (that I use all the time & had zero files saved to it, it's only used to remote in) to remote into my work computer. I went to open an excel file that I use every single day, and it's showing a version from August. What the heck was the point of backing up my files, only to lose all my work! The other few files I checked seem to be the current version, so not sure what happened here.. I'm just really sad, and worried about other files I haven't noticed yet. That is a LOT of hard work just gone!

You can recover previous versions. I'm sure how is linked multiple times in this thread and / or Google it. But that's obviously not the point this should NOT be happening.

The problem is, there are no previous versions. Only this random version from August. That is months and months of lost work. Thanks though :(

Hi,

Last year, I ran into a similar issue after booting up a computer that hadn't been used for six months—I ended up losing six months of work. I was devastated. The old versions were incorrectly timestamped as if they were from the day before, and the content from the long-unused hard drive ended up being treated as the current version, while everything else was wiped out—or so I thought. Later, I discovered that OneDrive's online recycle bin contained many deleted files that I could recover, but I still lost a significant amount of work.

Good luck with finding something in the recycle bin!