OneDrive keeps overwriting documents edited and saved locally with older versions from the cloud.

Question

This question has been asked before but the response given focused on recovering a version of a specific file, rather than on the underlying problem of why this keeps happening and how to stop it happening.

At my last company I used OneDrive with O365 extensively and never had this issue. But since moving to a new company and onboarding to their O365 with a new laptop issued by them, I am now having this happen multiple times per week where OneDrive will download and overwrite a more recent version of a file that I had edited locally with an older version from the cloud. This is really disruptive. I keep opening files and finding that my most recent work has been obliterated. It's to the point now where I am starting to do Save As to create backup copies to make sure I don't lose things that are important in the event that OneDrive screws up again. So frustrating as I had several years of never experiencing any problems like this with OneDrive. I also use OneDrive with my personal O365 account (both syncing to the same laptop) and that account never has this issue either, only the new company O365 account.

I wonder if there is some group policy or other O365 config setting thing that new company is doing that the old one didn't that is leading to this issue. The only thing I know about is that the new company disabled "set time automatically" by group policy which seems like a recipe for disaster. That said I regularly manually sync the clock and it's not drifting. The laptop is brand new and healthy,

How do we investigate/resolve this?

Answer 1

This is incredibly unhelpful. Here’s an idea Microsoft: whenever One-drive is tempted to overwrite a file saved one minute ago with a file from hours ago, give a pop-up box saying: “are you sure you want to open the old version and overwrite your newer locally saved version?”

Why hasn’t Microsoft done this??

I lost 1500 words of a 2000 word law school exam yesterday. I had started the six-hour exam on a local file. About halfway through, I thought, “I better manually open the one-drive app to make sure it’s good.” I furiously saved (ctrl+s) my Word doc with every edit toward the end…. But the only way to really protect oneself from the horror of One-Drive is to do a “Save As.” I was so excited to be finished with the grueling 7-hour experience, that I didn’t “save as.” I hit ctrl+s a bunch more and closed the 2000-word document. Just before uploading, I re-opened the document to make sure all was good, and up came a 500-word document from 5pm; it overwrote my 8:15pm 2000 word document, which I cannot get back.

Taking another four hours out of my week in my first semester of law school to rewrite those 1500 lost words will be brutal. Ask your lawyers who went to a top-tier law school. This is horrid.

Just add a failsafe mechanism to prevent old versions from overwriting more recently saved versions.

Answer 2

Too little and too late.

Since Microsoft apparently does not care enough about the problem,

and it had already cost me tons of money and lost time, I am compeltely

off one drive.

Answer 3

Does Microsoft even see any of these complaints?

Answer 4

Very similar problem just experienced here. Sorry I have no solutions, only shared frustrations. over saved documents that are overwritten by OneDrive with earlier versions, even on the same computer when opening the same document the next day. I spent a couple of hours trying to recover the most evolved versions of my files that had been overwritten by OneDrive via the document history function, first directly in Word and then via OneDrive and Sharepoint versions of the files but no useful eralier versions were saved apart from very early ones, which are similar to the overwritten versions now existing in OneDrive which do not include the last 48 hours of work. And I even Crtl S very frequently just in case.

It is all somewhat surprising because our organization and myself do use OneDrive for many daily operations and usually latest versions of documents are saved and also automatically loaded after synchronization when opening either the company labtop at home or the stationary one in the office.

So why now, with these specific files on the same labtop? It is spooky and demotivating and does not make you a friend of Microsoft / OneDrive.

Answer 5

I was very very verrrry luckily able to retrieve my list file. The morning after I wrote the above post, I went to Windows explorer, clicked on my C: drive, and searched for the file name on the whole c drive. It gave three results: one on one drive, one on my C drive that was synced to the One Drive (same exact thing) and one that was twice as large and ONLY on the C drive, not synced. It was in a weird location (not the file path I had been working) but it was the full 2000-word file.

I immediately went “save as” to change the name and ensure One Drive would not overwrite it.

After some experimenting, I’ve determined that every time I turn auto-save ON, it freezes the file as it was at that moment. If I make any changes, save, and close, when I reopen, the file shows up as what it was when I turned on auto-save.

I don’t know what to say, but my school has told me “do not ever use the One Drive app.” Apparently there’s a conflict between old One Drive software and current Office365. My school told me to start using Google drive for backup. I will just never ever turn on the One Drive app or Auto Save again. Just ctrl S ctrl S ctrl S, and “save as” every time I’m done editing a really vital file.

I hope you can find your file. If you haven’t yet, try a simple search of your whole entire hard drive. That worked for me much better than all the version searching I had done.