Onedrive running wild

I need help quick.

I had a problem with my start menu, so I restored a Macrium backup. I started working on it to add back the features and updates that were missing when it was created, but all of a sudden I discovered many files in my the 60gb My Documents folder had been mysteriously wiped out without a trace. I was also getting strange error messages when i tried to open certain thing, files or folders, something about the onedrive desktop folder. I couldn't open word documents.

Virus scans revealed nothing

I have a backup drive with a my documents partition, so I connected it and started rebuilding the the depleted one. It took quite a while, but I was well on the way to getting things back to normal, restoring the missing files and folders.

The it started happening again. I was in a folder, and poof, I watched files disappear.

Somehow, Onedrive had been set to sync from the My documents folder, and I can't stop it, First, I tried to deselect it, but it told me if I did, everything in my local My documents folder would be removed and irretrievable.

I restored another Macrium backup and got back the lost word functions and that onedrive error message, but I can't get it to stop syncing from my desktop app

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There is an option to "Unlink this PC", but I'm afraid of what will happen.

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I went to the online onedrive, thinking I could get to stop syncing there, but if there is a way, I can't find it.

Farvatten said:

How old were your Image Backups?

the first one wasabout 5 months old, the second was a month old.

So, what should I do? Unlink the PC? What will happen to the files? Is there no way to stop syncing from a particular folder online?

The way things are going it's gonna take 1-2 more days to finish.

The alternative is, stop the sync, un-link the account. then remove what's on the machine. Re-link the account so Onedrive sees it as new machine and brings down a fresh copy of everything that it has currently in the cloud. It will take even longer but it might save some of the work that was done in the last month.

However, at this point with both the 5 month image and 1 month image attempting to be synced, what's up there is inconsistent. But it may protect files that would otherwise get older copies put on top.if you let this thing finish and you have no other backups.

I'm not doubting any of the helpful explanations. but I'm been pretty much confused by this whole thing.

I got things back pretty much to normal, with gratitude to all those who taught me the lesson of backing up my data & and creating back up images.

For the third time, I again restored Macrium backup to my OS partition, and did the same on my Documents partition with a backup that was a few days old. Didn't lose much. Before I restored the documents, I uninstalled OneDrive. So, problem solved, that is, If you call not having OneDrive solving the problem.

I can't explain all the weird behavior I saw...the corruption of Word, the weird error popup related to OneDrive, etc., But the second time I restored with Macrium, the only difficulty I was having is the systematic wiping out of the My Document sub folder contents, because I couldn't stop OneDrive from sybcing.

But I have another thought. Somewhere along the way, my One Drive settings were corrupted/involuntarily changed. I never had my Desktop or Documents set for backup in OneDrive.

I then remembered way back when I was originally setting up OneDrive, the page after picking the OneDrive folder, was a page that asked you to pick the folders you wanted to backup, including the Desktop and Documents folder, which I disabled.

I'd like to try to reinstall OneDrive again, get get to those settings, and see if that will fix it. The problem is that I tried it, and the install process did not take me to those settings, and immediately started devastating my documents again.

Can someone advise me how to get to those installation settings?

I finally got it to work properly, by reinstalling with the OneDrive sync client. I didn't get the typical option when you install Onedrive for the first time of having the setup ask you which folders you want to sync, but I was able to get to the settings and deselect the folders I didn't want to sync without a problem


I still don't fully understand why it didn't work before. I can't remember exactly, but I think the first time I tried to reinstall, I did it from the WinSxS folder. Maybe that was the problem.