I received email "Many files were recently deleted from your OneDrive" but Recycle Bin contains only1 file

Question

I received the email message below. However, I did not recently delete a lot of files. When I go to OneDrive's recycle bin, there is only one file there. What generated the message? A random check of files on OneDrive appears that all files are there, but I am concerned about files being deleted that I am not aware of.

We noticed that you recently deleted a large number of files from your OneDrive. <br> <br>When files are deleted, they are moved to your OneDrive recycle bin. If you don't restore deleted files from the OneDrive recycle bin, they are permanently deleted after 30 days. <br> <br>If you want to restore these files, go to theOneDrive recycle bin, select what you want to restore, and click the Restore button. <br> <br>You can ignore this mail if you meant to get rid of these files.

Answer 1

Hi MCHTX_900,

Thanks for visiting Microsoft Community.

If you only found a deleted file in the OneDrive recycle bin but received a warning email, it seems to be a rare false alarm from OneDrive's bulk deletion detection mechanism. However, for the safety of your account and files, I think it's necessary to check your account's security status.

Please log in to account.microsoft.com, click "Security" in the left-hand list, and find and click the "View my sign-in activity" button. This will display your account's recent sign-in records. Carefully check if there are any sign-ins from other people. If there are, please change your password or security verification method as soon as possible.

I hope the above information clarifies the situation. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reply to me.

Best Regards,

Jonathan Z - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

Answer 2

I received that same email yesterday. When I turned on my computer today Microsoft cloud started deleting about 70,000 files. I did not do this. I stopped syncing with Microsoft cloud. There are no recently deleted files in the OneDrive recycle bin. I am worried something is deleting the files from my computer or One Drive.

Answer 3

I as well have been getting a bunch of these, all from Microsoft (I checked the headers and the links to verify), all saying Many Files have been deleted, if you want to keep them visit your Recycle Bin within 30days, nothing is ever in my Recycle Bin.

I have received one on Thursday, Saturday, Sunday and today.

I checked my security, no odd logins, and I only have one device linked.

I "think" that the issue may be that its backing up my Documents Folder, and Games like to store game data there, and maybe when its overwriting or moving save files from one folder to another I get the error? There doesn't seem to be any way to tell, as its not letting me know what all these files being deleted are, and there does not seem to be anywhere I can find to look.

Answer 4

Are there any messages when you click on the OneDrive cloud icon on the taskbar?

Something like this:

Answer 5

No, I had no messages showing anything being deleted.