Hey guys,
I have a customer who had been hacked recently so I went to backup documents, photos and such to a external HD and checked her OneDrive account and found most of what she had saved was on OneDrive.
I double checked the C: drive users file and went to save her desktop and documents only to find those locations were mostly empty. There were some files saved in there so I backed those up. I thinking she got switched over to one drive automatically at one point and it wasn’t set to back everything up?
Anyways, I thought OK, cool, she will just have to log back into OneDrive after the format and everything will be in there.
After the wipe she logged back into one drive only to find that many of her files were missing.
She was using the 5GB free version, is this possibly the culprit?
I’m wondering how everything that was in the one drive files showed before the wipe but then wasn’t there after… Did one drive just save the file headers? You would think there would have been a duplicate saved on the C: drive.
Can I get some clarification here? I’ve done this for many many customers and never had an issue. Is it something I missed? Or did one drive only save the headers due to the customer only using the free version?
i dont use onedrive.
but as its an external file store it should have a folder like windows recycler.
where the file gets moved on deletion, but it doesnt actually get deleted till you wipe that folder too.
Restore deleted files or folders in OneDrive - Microsoft Support might help.
Yeah I tried that and nothing was in there. I found an article that details another deeper recycle bin. I’m thinking she lost her files as she wasn’t paying for the full TB of storage. I’ve looked in all the usual places and came up with nothing. I wonder if a call to Microsoft would be able to recover this stuff? I mean, why would they store more than 5GB though if she wasn’t paying for it?
What happens to the data when someone keeps using one drive as the primary storage location and they run out of space? Does it store locally? I didn’t see any of this when I was backing up the data initially from the C: drive.
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well you still have options…
you could try Download Recuva | Recover deleted files, free!
with the caveat that you have likly already overwritten some of them when you re-imaged windows.
but you can still try it… just make sure you recover the data to another drive, dont try to recover in place as you will just over write other parts of the disk that you want to recover.