Forum Discussion
Thousands of pictures have disappeared after I removed sync!!! Where are they?
2. Have you turned on redirection of key folders to OneDrive? The Pictures folder will have moved from your local user profile to OneDrive
3. Contact Microsoft support. A public user forum like this cannot investigate your account
Lastly restore from your backups, which I am sure you have been making over the last 25 years.
Mike Williams with the help of microsoft tech support I found that deleting the local drive C:onedrive was the culprit. I restored the thumbnail from my PC recycle bin and all the photos reappeared. It took 2 hours. I am not sure how MYPC/pictures is linked to C: Onedrive. I deleted the latter because I was told if I want to make sure onedrive did no backups from my PC, I had to delete the local onedrive version as well. Microsoft support says I can go ahead and delete it through regedit but I am afraid the files will disappear again. What exactly is the connection between the directory MyPC/Pictures and C:Onedrive. How are they interconnected? why does deleting the latter remove the contents of the former?
" deleting the local drive C:onedrive " is going to delete the files inside. You need to check folder contents before deleting!
"What exactly is the connection between the directory MyPC/Pictures and C:Onedrive. How are they interconnected? why does deleting the latter remove the contents of the former?"
In Win11, look at OneDrive Settings > Sync and Backup > Backup import PC folders to OneDrive
There's a similar interface in earlier versions of Windows. This feature/behaviour has been around for a n umber of years. Key folders are redirected from local user profile on disk to OneDrive subfolders. Basically a version of user-profile roaming using OneDrive rather than local servers.Plus, backup your files. Cloud-synced files are not backups. Every second post here is someone deleting their OneDrive files or forgetting to pay for cloud storage, and losing stuff.
