Files on Onedrive have overwritten my local files, hwo can I undo it and get my previous files.

Jake 11

I noticed that my desktop was not being synched to OneDrive.

I then enabled the synching of my local Desktop to a folder called Desktop in OneDrive (it was already created)

OneDrive asked if I would like to keep or replace the data (seems like in the folder Desktop (in Onedrive) there were other folders which had the same files as the one locally)

after selecting keep , the information in OneDrive replaced the files which were local on the computer. problem is these files were outdated.

Is there a way to get back the files which were on my local file , I checked and the files were not sent to Recycle Bin.

Any ideas?

2 answers

Ceasar Chen_MSFT 4,391 Reputation points

2022-09-05T01:37:49.063+00:00

Hi, @Jake
The history can be viewed in onedrive for web, where you can find some previous files.
Moreover, you can also try to restore onedrive to get back deleted files.
restore-your-onedrive

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Jake 11 Reputation points

2022-09-06T12:19:22.373+00:00

Thank you for the reply Ceasar.

my problem is that the old files in oneDrive have overwitten the files I had on my local drive (yes, it seems they were the same name of file and folders).
By any chance, is there a way to undo this synchronization and be able to get back the correct files I had locally?
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Ceasar Chen_MSFT 4,391 Reputation points

2022-09-07T08:21:22.39+00:00

Have you tried to restore onedrive?

Jake 11 Reputation points

2022-09-08T17:16:22.207+00:00

Thank you for your reply.
Yes , I have tried that but nothing to be found there as I expected.
The files I am looking for were local on my computer (updated) and not the outdated files that were in Onedrive.

after synchronization the files in OneDrive have overwritten the local files .

When I check for the previous versions , i can see the previous version of the old files , nothing related to my updated files.

Ceasar Chen_MSFT 4,391 Reputation points

2022-09-09T03:03:07.72+00:00

If the rollback is also not found, it may not be recoverable.

Jake 11 Reputation points

2022-09-09T12:18:42.853+00:00

Alright, thank you for your time.

Emi Zhang-MSFT 21,706 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2022-09-15T09:39:25.983+00:00

It's glad to help you.

John Paitaki 6 Reputation points

2023-01-20T11:58:21.1333333+00:00

I have had 5his happen to several users in a corporate environment and have noticed disparity in how one drive chooses which wins (client or server). Some users local files overwrite the servers (in one case, good files on the server were overwritten by the local corrupt files) and in other cases, the server overwrote the newer local files.

This product is not usable. We have lost huge amounts of data and work hours. Provisional hours lost run into the 1000's of employee hours.

One Drive is , imho , a failure of a product had had the rest of the MS suite become, including Windows.

Microsoft, please prioritise stability and usability (I do not refer the complexity of features here but to not destroying current data)

Been a MS supporter since 8086 days but cannot see a future here. Time to move to a functional office environment and that will not be Office 365.

Massimo Ciacci 0 Reputation points

2023-11-14T19:01:06.6833333+00:00

Even if you rename your folders locally, and move stuff around, soon you will see that OneDrive sais all is synced. In the meantime the online version is still the old one. You do a hard reset, and then hope your local changes are not undone. The only hard proof is to check the WEB INTERFACE. I guess the only safe way is to "ONLY DO CHANGES via the WEB INTERFACE". Else it is not 100% predictable what OneDrive will do with sync... Also since time stamping is rather faulty, i wonder how can the sync tool make any decision.

Since the appearence of oneDrive, I have files of the past 15 years all showing the current date in all fields, modified, created etc. This forces me to add a Time stamp to each folder name to know the original file dates. Another bummer therefore. I am not happy that I must use OneDrive because my company does not accept any other way to share data across different laptops.

Please MS do something about oneDrive that makes it reliable on time-stamping (I guess it is not that easy)!

Also in Windows 11 today I noticed that if you attempt renaming a folder you will need to press F2 as long as needed until you managae changing the name before windows will reselect the whole folder name again; then I managed but only after shutting down the oneDrive process first.
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