OneDrive Deleting Local Files

System: Windows 10 (up to date)


The microsoft account (my brother's) is using my office 365 license.


After onedrive stopped syncing it's local folder to the cloud without any obvious reasons or clues as to why it did that, I decided to try and connect the microsoft account in question to windows 10, as it was running on a local user profile and some googling suggested that connecting the account to windows 10 might fix my problem. But as it turns out, that turned out to be a very bad idea indeed:

Onedrive seemingly was unable to detect and use the existing folder, but insisted to create a new one in total disregard of the onedrive data stored locally and in the cloud. Now my - honest while obviously completely wreckless - mistake: I told onedrive to use to existing folder, expecting it to compare the local folders and files to the folders and files in the cloud and to simply upload the files which didn't get uploaded over the last three weeks, while it had stopped working. In my humble opinion that's what the term syncing would suggest.


Here is what onedrive did now:

It deleted the entire file structure that was locally stored, slowly at that, as I was able to recreate that behaviour, putting the files into the recycle bin one after the other, without asking, only showing error messages that the file could not be uploaded as a file by the same name already existed in the cloud, for each file. There are 426 GB stored in the cloud. I think I was able to restore some files from the last three weeks which hadn't yet been uploaded from the recycle bin and save those to an external drive, but I am far form certain as to that whether it was all of them.


OneDrive was seemingly unable to compare files (using hashes), and simply sync the folders and files, but is programmed to clear the folder it was set to use, without any further notice? To me, that is not only odd and unreliable behaviour for a program like onedrive, but very disturbing indeed. I would suggest at least some sort of further notice before deleting anything when there is an error encountered, whatever the cause to that error might be. Simply deleting the data is completely unacceptable to me under that circumstances.


puzzled regards

philipp