Could somebody please explain to me, how people "lost files"? I think this is the part that really has me confused. The way I think about "lost files" would be that the files were permanently nuked, gone, never to be seen again. I think the worst case scenario here was that the location of the file was temporarily unknown.
Once Backup was shutoff, a shortcut was immediately placed in the original My Documents folder (which was otherwise empty), and that shortcut pointed to the C:\users\username\OneDrive\Documents folder (which would still contain 100% of your documents). You could easily copy or move the files from C:\users\username\OneDrive\Documents back to the original C:\users\username\Documents folder. Or if you elected to do nothing, you could continue to use that shortcut to go to the new location. Or you could just navigate to the new location via File Explorer. The point being, the files would always continue to remain in C:\users\username\OneDrive\Documents in perpetuity.
I have to admit that when I read your question, I couldn't stop laughing!
Not that I certainly know the answer and I, too, am curious to know what the answer(s) is/are but, in the meantime, allow me to humor you by speculating/guessing...
Perhaps they mean that files were deleted from OneDrive (via the app or web) and, due to the sync, the files were then deleted locally? In this situation, the deleted files will
not be in the
local Recycle Bin; therefore, the files have been "lost?" Well, no, because they
are available in the
OneDrive Recycle Bin!
Ok, then
perhaps they mean that the files were deleted from the
local OneDrive folder (i.e., outside of the OneDrive app, using File Explorer, for example) so, of course, they disappeared from the C: drive; therefore, the files have been "lost?" Well, no, because not only are the files available in your local Recycle Bin but they are
also in the
OneDrive Recycle Bin! Imagine that!
One more try: If you go through the lengths that I do to use OneDrive as a one-way sync only (i.e., from PC to OneDrive, with the physical copy
only existing on OneDrive) then, yeah, now the possibility of losing files is much more realistic because there is only
one copy. But then again, there's always the OneDrive Recycle Bin to the rescue!
That is, unless you are lazy and procrastinate, waiting only until after the retention window closes to try to recover your files!
Even in my use case, though, the files I upload to OneDrive are also on a USB drive
and my NAS, which prevents a single point of failure/data loss.
So, yeah, not sure what is meant by "lost" files, but I tried!
.. that is that i think OneDrive should not even be installed as default when installing windows.
