A Microsoft OneDrive user has taken to Reddit with a cautionary tale about their precious personal data in the cloud becoming inaccessible. Redditor deus03690 says that they have lost “30 years worth of irreplaceable photos” due to their misplaced trust in Microsoft’s cloud storage service.
In the discussion thread, the Redditor admits they may have made “a bad move” with their eggs-in-one-basket plan. However, to give the decision context they explain that they were moving house, faced space and relocation constraints, and were hemmed in by limited resources.
As a paying user of OneDrive, deus03690 has also been incredibly disappointed in Microsoft’s locking of their account without warning, and subsequent dead-end automated responses to questions regarding what happened. So, what did happen?
Consolidating before a major move
Deus03690 seems to have come face to face with a data preservation problem as a major move loomed. With a modicum of experience in OneDrive, and also having swallowed the Redmond “coolaide” [sic] at work, they thought they could get past a sticky data and life move situation by parking their precious data on some freshly paid for expansive cloud server space.
It is easy to criticize this plan, which resulted in a single point of failure, and is far from adhering to a 3-2-1 backup policy. But, life sometimes makes the rational difficult. Deus03690 later explains that they would be basically living from a suitcase for a time, had limited funds for physical backups, and they planned to restore the data to new physical data later. That would be, we assume, after settling down again.
“Kafkaesque black hole of corporate negligence”
With the “30 years worth of irreplaceable photos and work” literally vanished into thin air, deus03690 naturally expected to be able to get in touch with Microsoft to iron out issues and get the suspended account reactivated. So many corporations make real-human contact an impossible task, and taking this Redditor’s experience at face value, you might include Microsoft in that number.
To start with, deus03690 says they never even received a warning about any potential break of T&Cs, which might have resulted in the OneDrive account suspension. No light has been cast upon the situation since, with “No human contact. No actual help. Just canned emails and radio silence” – and 18 compliance form submissions, so far.
The Redditor then goes on to contrast the ownership / access rights to physical property with that of digital property. But they say they faced “a Kafkaesque black hole of corporate negligence,” so seem to hold little hope of retrieving their 30 years of precious data.
Indeed, when you pay for a service and are met with a brick wall the first time you want to iron out anything that isn’t on script, having no recourse to talk to a real human can be extremely frustrating.
Automated ban hammer mis-strike?
It seems likely that Microsoft wouldn't suspend a paying OneDrive user's account at random. Rather, having consolidated all their worldly data on this cloud service, something may have been uploaded by deus03690 that caused the copyright (or similar) klaxons to go off at Redmond and prompt this sudden suspension.
If this were the case, it wouldn't be a shock if we are seeing the fallout from a bogus strike by Microsoft. We say this as people with painful experience of the useless Microsoft Outlook spam filters that trash legitimate emails from contacts, but let through unsolicited abominations like "AMAZING! Unlock Your B@@nK_L0aN Now!!!"
We've reached out to the Redditor for more background info on the suspension. Meanwhile, deus03690 has been very responsive to comments on their popular post, which makes an interesting read. It is also a reminder, we will say it again, to back up your data regularly across multiple media and locations.
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