Missing Files on Multiple Drives

Question

I routinely save documents to One Drive and my local devices using Office 365. While working on several documents this evening, I accessed the documents folder on my primary device and found all sub-folders and documents were deleted. The deleted folders and documents were NOT synced to One Drive. and held several years worth of data and text documents. I accessed the local documents folder on my secondary device and found the same thing. I have reset One Drive, restored what files I could find in all recycle bins and run DISM...RestoreHealth on both devices to no avail. Secondary NAS HDDs also had their primary documents folder contents deleted. However, none of the unsynced missing documents were recovered. To avoid any recurrence, I have disabled One Drive on both devices.

Are there any additional steps I can attempt to restore the missing folders and files?

Desktop

Dell Optiplex 7050 /1 tB SSD & 500gB HDD, 2 NAS 1tB HDDs /Win11 Pro 22H2 OS22621.1992

Laptop

Lenovo L340/1tB SSD /8gB ram /same NAS as above/ Win11 Home 22H2 OS22621.1992

Answer 1

Are you sure that you logged into the computer with the right account?

Answer 2

The default installation of Office 365 and its OneDrive component uploads all the contents of the PC  \My Documents\ folders to OneDrive, (syncs) and there will be a OneDrive folder in File Explorer containing all the OneDrive content. And in Word etc the default Save location is set to OneDrive.

No Docs/data is stored on the local PC

OneDrive would not be using any NAS unless you had amended the default O365/OneDrive settings

DISM will have no impact on OneDrive

Files deleted in OneDrive can be recovered via OneDrive web access, recover deleted

Nothing would be deleted to the win recycle bin

Answer 3

Yes, I only have one account.

Answer 4

Thank you for your reply. That is what I thought, unfortunately.

Answer 5

Hello,

Thank you for coming to the forum, my name is Fuad.

I have to inform you that this is a user forum and not Microsoft directly. We here are users like you helping one another. Even though the forum is hosted by Microsoft, it is moderated by users like you and me.

You seem to have done everything there is, and I am sorry, but there is nothing else to do:

1. You have restored files from OneDrive.com, and checked the cloud recycle-bin also.
2. You have run repairs on your disks
3. You have checked old backups.

You have covered all the basics, and I am sorry there is no other step to take.

If there is anything else on this subject you have a question on, do let me know. If not, have a wonderful rest of your day.

Best Regards Fuad