The call from Gorgie-Dalry that starts with "OneDrive has deleted everything on my laptop" is one of the most common recovery jobs the workshop sees, and one of the most misunderstood. Nobody clicked delete. Nothing crashed. The files were there yesterday. This morning the Documents folder shows one lonely shortcut to something called "Where are my files?" and the Pictures folder is empty. It looks catastrophic. It usually isn't.
This is the guide we wish more people had read before they rang, because the panic step — reinstalling OneDrive, running a "cleanup" tool, or signing in again to "resync" — is exactly the step that turns a small problem into a real one. If you've just spotted this on a Gorgie-Dalry laptop, stop for a moment and read the "what not to do" section first.
Why Sync Clients Delete Files You Never Touched
OneDrive, iCloud Drive, Dropbox and Google Drive all share one design assumption: the folder on your PC and the folder in the cloud are meant to look identical. When they don't match, the client picks one side to trust and makes the other side match it. When the cloud side is the one being trusted, and the cloud side has gone empty for any reason, the client will happily go around your local machine and delete to match.
There are only a handful of ways the cloud side ends up empty, and once you know them, the pattern of loss is easy to recognise. Someone signed into a fresh Microsoft account by accident (a family member's, a work account, a brand-new one). Someone accepted a "Reset OneDrive" prompt during a Windows update. A phone signed into iCloud with the wrong Apple ID and pushed a blank Photos library. A shared Dropbox folder had its top-level contents deleted by a colleague and the sync did what sync does. In each case, no file was ever "deleted" in the way most people picture — the sync client just rewrote the local drive to match a blank cloud.
What to Stop Doing Straight Away
The single most damaging habit is trying to fix a sync problem by touching the sync client. Every reinstall, every "unlink this PC", every "run repair", is another chance for the client to write over the working directory in ways that make later recovery harder.
- Do not sign out and sign back in. That is often the reflex — "let me refresh it". It commits whatever the current sync state is and blows away the local shadow copies OneDrive keeps behind the scenes.
- Do not empty any Recycle Bin. Both Windows' Recycle Bin and OneDrive's own web Recycle Bin usually have the files still in them, tagged with the exact folder path they came from. Leave them alone.
- Do not run "PC cleaner" or "storage optimiser" tools. They routinely rip out the Volume Shadow Copies and the "Previous Versions" data that File History leans on. That is the single biggest cause of a solvable job becoming an unsolvable one.
- Do not reinstall Windows. Every so often somebody arrives having "just done a reset to fix it". A fresh Windows install writes over unallocated space with a factory image; that erases the exact area a forensic tool would have pulled the missing files from.
A Recent Gorgie-Dalry Story
A retired couple living in a top-floor tenement near Dalry Road brought a laptop in a few weeks back. Their son had helped them set up a new Microsoft account after the old email address stopped working, and once he was gone the laptop had signed OneDrive back in — but into the shiny new account, which was empty. Overnight, the sync client did its job and made the local Pictures, Documents and Desktop folders match the empty cloud. Twelve years of family photos, including irreplaceable ones of a grandson who'd since emigrated, appeared to be gone.
Half of it came back within twenty minutes on the bench. The old Microsoft account still existed at Microsoft's end and still had files in its OneDrive Recycle Bin — a browser sign-in as that account, an "empty selection, restore all", and the entire archive was back. Another chunk came from Windows' File History, which the couple had never knowingly turned on but which Windows had quietly configured against an old external drive still plugged into the router. The last handful of files — the most recent, unluckily — came out of the SSD's unallocated space with a proper carving tool. Three sources, one afternoon; nothing was actually lost.
The Layers a Bench Recovery Actually Uses
The reason a sync-deletion job is often recoverable is that the files sit in more places than the owner realises. In rough order of what we check on a Gorgie-Dalry laptop that has just lost its Documents folder to a bad sync:
- OneDrive's own web Recycle Bin. Deletions from a synced folder land here first, usually with a 30-day retention. This is the fastest win by a long way.
- Windows' Recycle Bin. Local deletions from the sync client often route through here as well, and are recoverable in one click.
- Volume Shadow Copies / File History. Windows keeps snapshots on many machines even where the owner never set it up, especially where a Backup drive was once plugged in. "Restore previous versions" on a folder brings a lot back.
- Cloud version history. OneDrive keeps up to 25 prior versions of each file. When files were overwritten rather than deleted, that history is the recovery path.
- Local unallocated space. If the first four failed, we image the drive and carve the filesystem for orphaned records. This is a slower job and where a full data recovery workflow starts to look like the same techniques used for a failed drive.
When It's a Business Laptop, Not a Personal One
A meaningful share of the small businesses along Dalry Road — the letting agents, the small accountancy practices, the salons that keep client records — run OneDrive for Business or SharePoint under the bonnet. Two things change when it's a work tenant. The retention window can be much longer (Microsoft 365 tenants often keep a 93-day site collection recycle bin), and a tenant administrator can restore an entire OneDrive to its state at any point in the last 30 days in a single action. That is a fantastic recovery route the owner rarely knows exists.
Where a business laptop is involved we ask, before anything else, who owns the Microsoft 365 tenant. If it's the business, and there's an admin sign-in, half the work is a call to the right person. If nobody knows, that discovery on its own is often the fix. Our business IT support engagements usually start by making sure the tenant admin path is documented before anything sync-shaped goes wrong again.
How to Set It Up So This Doesn't Happen Twice
The sensible version of "backup" for a modern laptop is not one thing, it's two things doing different jobs. The sync client (OneDrive, iCloud, whichever) is a live mirror between devices; treat it as that, not as a backup. The backup itself is a separate, honest copy that a rogue sync can't reach into — an external drive that gets plugged in weekly and unplugged again, or a cloud backup service (Backblaze, iDrive, Arq) that is independent of the sync tenant.
On the sync side, two settings are worth changing on every laptop we set up. Turn on Windows File History against a small external SSD kept on the desk. Turn on "Notify me when a lot of files are deleted from the cloud" in the OneDrive settings — Microsoft added that toggle for exactly the scenarios this article describes, and it will stop a bad sync in its tracks before it's completed. If the sync client itself is misbehaving repeatedly, that is usually a software troubleshooting job on the profile itself rather than a data problem.
If the Old Machine Is Being Retired at the Same Time
Some of the tenement-flat visits in Gorgie-Dalry are combination jobs — recover the files off the failing family laptop, and also work out what to do with the fifteen-year-old tower under the desk that has been slowly clicking for months. Once the recovery is safely done, the retired machine can go through our IT recycling route, which properly wipes the drives before the metals go to the appropriate stream. That last step matters — a laptop dropped in the wheelie bin still has your entire life on it.
If You're Reading This on a Laptop With Empty Folders
Do not touch the sync client. Do not sign out. Do not empty any Recycle Bin. Sign into your Microsoft or Apple account in a browser on a different device — a phone works fine — and look at the web Recycle Bin first. If the files are there, restore them from the web, not from the panicking laptop. If they are not, ring us before doing anything else. Whether it's Gorgie, Dalry, Tynecastle or across into Fountainbridge and Slateford, we can usually collect the same afternoon; the earlier we see the machine, the more layers are still intact.
If you'd like more background before you bring the laptop in, the walk-through of recovering deleted files on Windows covers the Recycle Bin and Previous Versions layers in more depth, and the broader hard-drive data recovery guide explains where a carving job takes over when the friendlier layers have been overwritten.
Last updated: 7 July 2026