I’ve just fucking well lost work. Any help?

[theferry]

Just a vent at OneDrive. A full day’s work has gone. I was really happy with it, as well. I’ve gone through the version history and there’s no record of that day’s work at all. I know I did it a week ago, but the most recent version history is 22 Nov.

Does anyone know of other ways to retrieve work? I’m on an IPad using Word.

Just thought this might be better on a different board. (I’m an academic)

No help but huge sympathy. Hope you can retrieve it.

I had this happen at my workplace - is there any chance it's still saved to the cloud? (In Office365)

Can you get onto a Laptop and log-in to One Drive that way to check? I always think the iPad versions are quite restrictive. It must have saved it somewhere different?

Ask chat gpt for help. It helped me recently when google couldn't.

I’ve tried my laptop, but it’s the same as the iPad.

OneDrive is the cloud location for Office—I don’t think there are other cloud services.

Thankfully, I have only lost one day’s work. The older versions are all available as they should be. It’s just the most recent day that there’s no record or.

Do you have more than one OneDrive - personal and institution? Sometimes it switches between the two sneakily.

Could it have saved into your ipad files by mistake?

Good suggestion re ChatGPT, but nothing there has worked.

It is weird that everything is there, apart from this one missing day a week ago.

@MassiveTit no, just the one work account.

@ExquisiteDecorations tried that, but no luck.

If it's an institution/workplace thing, ask their tech support.

If it's not, contact Microsoft OneDrive support.

Try doing this from within Word:
Click on File
Click “More documents” (bottom right under the list of recent documents that comes up

Scroll though them and see if it’s there….
fingers crossed!

Any sign of it in your temp files?

Can you ask your IT department for help? It’s such a strange thing to happen, assuming it isn’t human error, I would guess it’s a known glitch if you see my logic?

If you open word does it appear in your recent documents? I've had that issue where it randomly saved elsewhere

Sometimes I think I've saved something to OneDrive and it's actually saved to my computer instead -- possibly worth checking?

Fingers crossed your IT people are able to help you find the work - and if they are backing up OneDrive centrally every day then they can probably reload the most recent copy of the files you were working on.

Is OneDrive solely cloud-based or is it also local (e.g. like Dropbox)? If so then you might be able to uncover it wherever iPads store temp files. I've no idea but this is the sort of thing I'd put into Google https://www.google.com/search?q=where+are+temp+onedrive+files+stored+on+ipad (ignore any advice about clearing your cache obviously, until you find it).

For example my Mac fritzed the other day, apparently wiping an Inkscape file I was working on - but I was able to find an earlier-by-five-minutes autosave copy by looking in this location ^file:///Users/jo/Library/Application%20Support/org.inkscape.Inkscape/cache/inkscape/^ - those aren't locations I'd know to look in had Google not previously helped me in finding it.

For individual files: if I pull down on the homescreen on my iPad a search bar appears so if there's something similar on yours try searching for a word or phrase that will appear in your document but is less likely to appear in other documents (you can put " " around the phrase) and see if that brings up the file (depends if it's indexed your files or not). I'm not really sure how iPads work!

Have a look at the suggestions for recovering unsaved Word documents too (see pic for examples).

Good luck!
Jo

I feel your pain. I hate OneDrive, but it's that or pay Apple for iCloud. I spend enough money & time subsidising the university as it is.

But - it might be in iCloud - can you get to a laptop/desktop, and log in to your iCloud via a web browser and see what's there?

My onedrive is a complete arse, I often have to either open file explorer and go to 'home' rather than 'onedrive' and search for the name of the doc as its nowhere to be seen.

Sometimes when that doesn't work if I go to onedrive via Web browser rather than file Explorer the document appears.

Something else - my org uses delve on office 365, and if I look myself up on that it shows all the documents I have opened / modified recently.

Thanks everyone for those suggestions. I’ve tried everything and got no where.

Work made some suggestions that didn’t work and they can’t help me any more.

Guess I’ll have to start again! Thankfully it was a chunk of writing that I still have notes for.

Is it worth opening the version that you made changes to and see where it is automatically saving to? You might find your lost version in the same place.