OneDrive suddenly became empty after university storage policy change Is recovery still possible?

Hello everyone,

I am looking for technical guidance regarding a serious OneDrive for Business issue under Microsoft 365 Education.

Environment

- Microsoft 365 Education tenant.

- University-managed account.

- OneDrive for Business.

- My account is still active and I can sign in normally.

What happened

On July 16, 2026, I signed into my OneDrive and discovered that my entire "My files" folder was empty.

I verified the following:

- I am signed into the correct account.

- "My files" is completely empty.

- The OneDrive Recycle Bin is empty.

- "Restore your OneDrive" does not show any mass deletion event.

- My OneDrive site is accessible, but there are no files.

- I unfortunately do not have a complete local backup.

A few days later, my university informed students that they had reduced the OneDrive storage quota from 5 TB to 30 GB due to a Microsoft/provider policy update.

I suspect my OneDrive contained more than 30 GB because I had stored backups from my previous computer together with years of academic, personal and work files.

However, I would like to understand whether exceeding the new storage quota could actually cause an existing OneDrive site to appear completely empty, or whether this suggests another issue such as:

- OneDrive reprovisioning

- Site replacement

- License reassignment

- Site deletion

- Storage migration

- SharePoint issue

- Other administrative problem

The university initially described this as a temporary Microsoft incident, but later told me that the files had been deleted because of the OneDrive application, without providing any technical explanation.

I have already asked the university IT department to investigate:

- Deleted Sites in SharePoint Admin Center

- Second-stage Recycle Bin

- Retention policies

- Previous OneDrive site

- Licensing history

- Possible restore options

My question to Microsoft experts is:

1. Can a storage quota reduction (5 TB → 30 GB) ever make an existing OneDrive appear completely empty?

2. Are there other administrative scenarios that could produce this behavior while leaving the account active?

3. Is there anything specific I should ask my Microsoft 365 administrator to verify that is commonly overlooked?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated because these files represent several years of academic, professional and personal work.

Thank you very much.