Urgent: Files Reverting to Older Versions on OneDrive

Anonymous
2024-05-25T06:34:20+00:00

Dear Microsoft Support,

I am experiencing an issue where many of my recently used files on OneDrive have reverted to older versions over the past few months. It is only today that I have discovered this issue. I access OneDrive on two PCs, my phone, and frequently online at work.

Typically, I notice a file has been overwritten with an older version when I check the version history and see two entries with the exact same date and time. Often, the overwritten version’s file size matches that of an older version from a few entries back on the list. There is no consistency in the dates and times when this issue occurs. It seems to be happening randomly. I've found that this has occurred with hundred's of my files.

This problem has been very frustrating and has significantly undermined my confidence in OneDrive. Could you please advise me if you're aware of any such issues and if you're working to resolve them. Also, can you please advise me as to how I can prevent this from happening in the future?

Thank you for your assistance.

Regards,

Michael

Edit: Further to the above, I've also discovered that OneDrive doesn't sync automatically between my PC and Laptop when I make changes to files. I have to quit and then re-start OneDrive on the other computer in order for it to sync and receive the updated file. It also doesn't automatically sync when I attempt to restore to a previous version. In order for it to update the file back to the pervious version I have to quit and re-start OneDrive (or possibly just pause and resume syncing, which I never tried).

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-10-23T16:23:04+00:00

    I have this problem even with files that I open on only one machine, which is kind of crazy.

    Today I noticed that this happened with a Word document and an Excel spreadsheet. Both are usually open in the background, with auto-save enabled, so they had more than enough time (hours, if not days) to sync.

    Just because I was lucky enough to notice a missing paragraph that I knew I had written in the Word document, I decided to investigate. In version history, I could see that on September 30, the two files were overwritten with versions from September 27.

    What's even more disconcerting is that I hadn't opened or worked on the documents at all between September 27 and today, October 23. So this wasn't some kind of connectivity issue or sync problem – OneDrive decided to overwrite my files with older versions all on its own, without any indication to me. I'm now pretty worried about how many other changes, and which ones, I might have inadvertently lost in my thousands of other files. Even if I could check them all, I don't know their latest contents by heart (which is kind of why I use a computer to store the stuff, and not my brain).

    I guess you could find these cases by checking the version histories for changes that happened without the files having been opened, but without some automated way to do this, that's not feasible.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-10-23T16:35:32+00:00

    Hi,

    This is really problematic.

    What i can suggest is to write feedback from the OneDrive app because there is a chance that someone technical will answer your problems. I do this in hope that someone will check it. This forum is useless. Nobody from the MS probably even look here. I always get stupid solutions and I do not even know if this problems are passed to MS OneDrive team..

    If you will get answer which could be beneficial to us please post it here. Thanks

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-10-24T06:09:07+00:00

    Hi Anamon,

    I definitely feel OneDrive reverted to older files by itself as I did not click to revert to an old file.

    Hope you manage to get something sorted out.

    As it happened to me a few times, and these were important work files, I am no longer using OneDrive.

    Kind regareds

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-10-24T08:55:17+00:00

    Last week, abt 19 Oct. Onedrive on my laptop required signing in again (never before), on sign in, it brought up my old obsolete school account, so I had to sign in again with my current account on the laptop.

    During this time, no trouble on windows desktop pc.

    After logging in, only my desktop pc, 2 versions of files appeared, with original name and with file name followed by laptop name.

    I have office 365 subscription.

    So I do not know if content of files is changed.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-10-29T11:10:06+00:00

    Last week OneDrive silently rolled back two of my files, one Excel, one PowerPoint. Now I'm uncertain what changes I've lost over thousands of documents. File integrity is everything. If I can't rely on OneDrive to store files then I need to stop using it.

    This is NOT a Sync issue between machines. I have one machine connecting to one OneDrive account.

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