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I need to recover some files from an old hard drive. They are in the Onedrive folder and seem to be offline (there’s a cross icon on them and show the O attribute when I do “attrib filename” with any of them.

These are files I deleted from my cloud onedrive long ago, so I have no way to recover them from any cloud Onedrive previous backup (I checked this already, they aren’t present even on the Onedrive older backups in the cloud).

Judging by the size of the files (images, docx and text files): they’re not “empty”, so I guess they have all the contents and they should be recoverable.

I tried copying them over to my current Onedrive folder with Robocopy, but they are also offline in destination and can’t be opened.

I cannot copy them with copy-paste as I get a pop-up "cloud provider not found..." or similar.

Is there any way to recover these files? I’m using the same Onedrive account and credentials that I used when I was using the old drive.

I copied them over with this command: ROBOCOPY F:\USERS\RichardK\Onedrive C:\Users\RichardK\Onedrive /MIR /B

Any help much appreciated

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    Ignore copying them to a onedrive location. If they are available on that PC then you should simply be able to copy them to a standard folder or USB stick.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Jul 29, 2021 at 22:34

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There is the "OneDrive On Demand" feature which, if enabled, could cause files to only live online and not exist locally. I believe it's controlled by this in the OneDrive settings.

enter image description here

If this is checked, or was checked while OneDrive was being used, then OneDrive might not keep/have kept a local copy. (What is in it's place is an NTFS reparse point).

Judging by the size of the files (images, docx and text files): they’re not “empty”, so I guess they have all the contents and they should be recoverable.

In this case, you're probably correct. All you need to do is copy them over.

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  • Like I said, I copied the files with Robocopy and they still show blank when I open them, even though the sizes indicate that they have contents. I cannot copy them with copy-paste as I get a pop-up "cloud provider not found..." or similar. Thanks for your answer.
    – Antonio23249
    Jul 30, 2021 at 14:00
  • Interesting. Hate to say it, but maybe then all that was copied was reparse points, and maybe the file size info is embedded in them. I was unable to find deep technical information on how OneDrive works to confirm, though, but it really sounds like if the OneDrive account doesn't exist, the data can't be retrieved.
    – LawrenceC
    Jul 30, 2021 at 14:10
  • well, that makes sense, I checked now and those offline files show sizes like: "size: 50,605 KB", "size on Disk: 0". size on disk is the size it's really taking up in the disk (clusters being used). Same with the copy done with robocopy. Thank you
    – Antonio23249
    Jul 31, 2021 at 14:44
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LaurenceC seemed to hint to the right answer: the problem is that those offline files in source are really empty, they show sizes like: "size: 50,605 KB", "size on Disk: 0". size on disk is the size it's really the file is taking up in the disk (adding clusters being used). Same with the copy done with robocopy. The other size is probably embedded in the file and robocopy copies that too.

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