OneDrive problems: Report No.2

This being a second report on my troubles with Microsoft’s OneDrive product, first reported in a postscript to reference 1.

OneDrive is Microsoft’s cloud offering, a secure place to keep one’s data, available from any of one’s devices. For me it supplied services which I had got in the past from Dropbox (now available through HP) and from BT Cloud (now discontinued). I also make some use of Google’s gdrive, this last being mainly driven by my Samsung telephone. With the idea being that cloud is more convenient and more secure than maintaining backup copies of one’s stuff on data sticks, by hand, as it were.

What appears to have happened here is that perhaps half a dozen Excel workbooks, usually updated on a more or less daily basis, reverted to earlier versions, thus losing about a week’s worth of updates, from the 4th to the 11th of April. There is also something going on in the Word world, although I have not yet found any damage to data.

It seems probable that this loss was caused by some obscure problem with the OneDrive product. It also seems possible that one of its problems was the age of one of my devices, still on Windows 10, due to come out of service in a few month’s time.

I asked both Gemini and Copilot about my problems. Both were talkative and plausible, with the former concentrating on all the many things that might have gone wrong and the latter being more about what I might do about it. I also contacted Microsoft support, who were briefly responsive but who were not, in the end, very helpful. A snap from the Gemini activity log is included above.

A few days later, I am left with three problems.

First, and most important, there is a loss of trust in OneDrive. Is it reliable enough to be useful?

Second, there seems to be something wrong with my version of OneDrive versions, with no versions of any of my documents being available – despite OneDrive appearing to know all about their update history.

Third, I have half a dozen files to repair manually, as best as I am able.

I think that the OneDrive problems are very likely a one-off - although a quick foray with Bing suggests that problems of this sort were reported on user forums about a year ago. But it has not happened to me before and may well not happen again – at least not for a while. And I don’t think that there is much to be done on the engineering front, at least not by me. It would be nice to have their versions, but I can live without them.

So, for the moment, my response has been to copy most of the files which are subject to update off OneDrive, and to work offline, although I shall probably put updates back onto OneDrive in due course. Another copy has gone to gdrive. Another has gone to a data stick. All of which leaves most of my stuff on OneDrive.

Over the next few days, I shall do what I can to repair the damaged Excel workbooks.

Then we shall see.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/04/gbk.html.