Onedrive download last disc
Since we don’t know why they disappeared, there’s little I can offer to prevent this from happening again - except, of course, not using Downloads for long term storage, and making sure you start backing up your machine right away. You may be out of luckĭifficult as it is to accept, it’s possible the files are gone forever. As a last-gasp effort, I’d try a file recovery tool like Recuva to see if the files can be recovered from the unused space on your hard disk. Depending on your OneDrive account, it may have a File History or Recycle Bin you can check. If you’re using OneDrive, it’s possible that your Downloads folder will, ironically, be uploaded to your OneDrive storage.
#Onedrive download last disc windows#
Assuming you have it enabled, see if you can locate the missing file(s) in Windows 10’s File History.Ĭheck OneDrive.
This may also lead you to understand what happened and locate other files as well.Ĭheck File History. If the file was moved to a different folder, you might find it there.
Try to recall the name of one of the files, and search for it using Windows Search or the Command Prompt. If they are, you can quickly and easily restore them. If the files were accidentally deleted by something you did in Windows File Explorer, or by a Recycle Bin-aware utility, it’s possible the file(s) you’re looking for could still be there. So, with the admonitions out of the way, I do have a few things for you to try.Ĭheck the Recycle Bin. If your Downloads folder had been getting backed up (as an image backup would have ensured), you wouldn’t have lost anything except the time to locate the backup copy and restore the file(s). My recommendation is a periodic image backup, with daily incremental backups, but the details matter less than doing it. If you lost something because it was deleted, then it’s pretty obvious you hadn’t backed it up.Ĭhange that. That’s true whether it was in the Downloads folder or anywhere else. Seriously, if you lost a file because the one copy you had of it disappeared, clearly you aren’t backing up. If you lost anything, you aren’t backing up Perhaps create folders by topic, or whatever makes sense to you.īut move them somewhere else. Maybe create a “Utilities” folder in your Documents folder, maybe create a “Downloaded PDFs” folder somewhere. Instead, once you’ve downloaded something you intend to keep - anything - move it to a different folder of your own. It was never intended as a place to keep things, and leaving things in the Downloads folder is a recipe for disaster, which you’re discovering. In my opinion, the Downloads folder should never be used for long-term storage. More importantly, in my opinion you’re doing two things wrong, and one of those could impact much more than just downloads.ĭownloads is for downloads, not for storage An empty Downloads folder. There are many possibilities, and I’ll run through a few options to see if we can get lucky. With cloud storage, the meanings have flipped.It really depends on how or why the files disappeared. Back then, data that was stored on the running system was "online" and data that was sitting in a cupboard was "offline".
#Onedrive download last disc Offline#
Last I checked, Dropbox worked quite differently.ġ The Offline attribute in Windows predates OneDrive by years – its origin was the "Hierarchical Storage Management" subsystem, which allowed unused files to be offloaded to tape or similar. It also allows changing the pinned/unpinned flags, so you can actually mark files as "always keep" purely through the command line. If you're working with bare Cmd (no access to PowerShell), the attrib command will show "Recall on access" as the M flag and (I think) "Offline" as O. In PowerShell, (Get-Item $file).Attributes will have these flags. Files that are temporarily cached have neither of those attributes. Meanwhile, "Always keep on this device" corresponds to the Pinned attribute (0x80000). Such files also seem to have the undocumented Unpinned attribute (0x100000), though I'm not sure if it's always all 3 attributes that are present or if there are situations. Instead, query the file attributes (the same as Hidden/ReadOnly) – if the file is not cached locally, it will have the Offline 1 and RecallOnAccess attributes (bits 0x1000 and 0x400000 respectively). I think it's possible to query size-on-disk, but that could be misleading if you happened upon a sparse file, or NTFS compressed file, or something else that's legitimately smaller on disk.