Forum Discussion
Accidentally deleted ALL of my files
I was under the impression that I was saving all of my files locally. I occasionally accidentally save something in OneDrive, and would leave it there, but most things were going into Documents, Pictures, etc. I have a different OneDrive path on my computer that I could see when I saved documents in Word.
Today I decided it was annoying to keep accidentally saving in the wrong place, so I deleted OneDrive. There were way too many files for the Recycle Bin, so it was a hard delete.
To my shock, all of my folders vanished. It turns out Documents, Videos, etc, were all in OneDrive. The problem is that when I go online and sign into my onedrive, I only see the files that I would occasionally accidentally save there, and those have not been deleteed. The bulk of my files, the ones from my local computer, are not there. I tried resetting to yesterday and it looks exactly the same.
Any idea where those files were saved/are now? Are they recoverable or am I epically screwed?
1 Reply
Check your Recycle Bin
Even though you said the deletion bypassed it, it’s still worth verifying:
- Right-click Recycle Bin → Open.
- If it’s empty, try the OneDrive online Recycle Bin too:
- Go to onedrive.live.com
- Click Recycle Bin on the left.
- Check both primary and second-stage recycle bins (scroll to bottom → “Second-stage Recycle Bin”).
Use File Recovery Tools
If the files were hard-deleted, you can often still recover them with data recovery software, provided they haven’t been overwritten.
Microsoft’s own tool:
Windows File Recovery (free from Microsoft Store)
Command example (replace drive letter accordingly):
winfr C: D: /regular /n *.*
Or use reputable third-party tools.
Check Backups and Cloud Versions
If you’ve ever used:
- Windows File History (Control Panel → File History)
- OneDrive Personal Vault / Backup
- Time Machine / External backup drive
Check there — they might contain snapshots of your user folders.
Windows 10/11 often “moves” Desktop, Documents, Pictures, etc. into OneDrive automatically when you set up cloud backup. Even though they looked local, they were being synced to (and stored in) your OneDrive directory. Deleting OneDrive removed the entire structure.
When you reinstalled or reactivated OneDrive, it showed only files that were already synced to the cloud — not the ones that never finished syncing or were deleted locally before upload.
