Sharepoint OneDrive: Deleted File NIGHTMARE!!!

[talksr]

Hi all,

I was just wondering if anyone else has experienced this, knows of a better way of doing things?

 

I recently moved a public staff shared area folder to the cloud to help save storage on our server. The Staff Shared Area was a total of 273GB:mad:

Despite my repeated requests for staff to please delete things that are no longer needed it has not helped. I also asked for anything that doesn't need to be public, to be moved to staff personal drives:mad:

 

I moved the Staff Shared Area to a OneDrive I created within a SharePoint site called Curriculum Staff.

Within the Documents section of this SharePoint site, I created a folder called Staff Shared Area and put in all of the files from our local Staff Shared Area.

 

Within hours of this going live on 8th Jan, half the folders had gone missing and what remained was folders with nothing inside. :mad:

 

First and second stage recycle bins had thousands and thousands of these files, there were too many to restore and the site would keep crashing so I had no choice but to log a call with MS.

I needed a way to batch restore the files and all of the ways of doing it using PS were not working, maybe due to our Azure subscription as we are just a primary.

 

It has taken Microsoft a day short of a month to restore these files. Really embarassing as I have gone on and on about how the Cloud is the way forward. I appreciate the area is massive, but surely there must be a quicker way to resolve a situation like this in the future? MS have not told me how they restored it all, the recycle bins are showing "Deleted by user x" but the users in question are certain the deleted nothing.

It is not the switchover to Cloud I had been hoping for having written guides for staff on how to access the new Cloud based Staff Shared Area and how to 'add shortcut to OneDrive' so that the shared area would be in their OneDrive whenever they log in.

 

As a counter measure/damage limitation, I am thinking of creating different shares for some of the folders within this Staff Shared Area. So having three shares rather than just the one so that if something is deleted, hopefully it will be within one of three shares rather than just the one.

 

Does anyone have any experiences of this/advice? I am very disappointed it has taken Microsoft so long to resolve this, it has massively knocked staff confidence and left me wondering why I bothered to switch over to the Cloud as within a matter of hours, all of my work was in tatters.

 

:mad::mad::mad:

[Cazab]

Your staff are lying.

[chris11256]

In my case this is why I have Barracuda cloud backup and our backup Synology NAS running the Microsoft 365 backup tool, both are much better at bulk restores that the native SharePoint UI. I ended up doing this because a Physics teacher accidentally deleted his entire departmental folder which had years worth of archived teaching content.

 

But also yes to the above, someone is fibbing.

[talksr]

Your staff are lying.

 

In my case this is why I have Barracuda cloud backup and our backup Synology NAS running the Microsoft 365 backup tool, both are much better at bulk restores that the native SharePoint UI. I ended up doing this because a Physics teacher accidentally deleted his entire departmental folder which had years worth of archived teaching content.

 

But also yes to the above, someone is fibbing.

 

 

Thank you both for your helpful comments.

Is it possible to use the Microsoft 365 backup tool on a Windows Server? I am wondering if i could run it on our current Windows NAS? The school has zero budget, so we will not be able to purchase subscriptions or backup devices.

[TechMonkey]

Thank you both for your helpful comments.

Is it possible to use the Microsoft 365 backup tool on a Windows Server? I am wondering if i could run it on our current Windows NAS? The school has zero budget, so we will not be able to purchase subscriptions or backup devices.

 

Is the NAS a Synology box? They have a O365 solution built in for free (excluding any extra cost for storage you may need!).

Have you looked at the auditing facilities in M365, that would be able to tell you who did anything with a file, let alone delete it.

 

Getting it split up would be best, a huge area like that is ripe for someone doing something silly like doing a spring clean on everything they don't want. By year group or by subject and then only assign the staff who deal with those areas. Limits accidents.

[talksr]

Is the NAS a Synology box? They have a O365 solution built in for free (excluding any extra cost for storage you may need!).

Have you looked at the auditing facilities in M365, that would be able to tell you who did anything with a file, let alone delete it.

 

Getting it split up would be best, a huge area like that is ripe for someone doing something silly like doing a spring clean on everything they don't want. By year group or by subject and then only assign the staff who deal with those areas. Limits accidents.

 

 

Thanks for the post. No sadly, it is just an HP server running Windows server software.

Yes, I did look at the auditing over a month back to try and get to the bottom of it. It produced a LOT of info, but I did narrow it down and it did seem to point to the users in question but they are certain it wasn’t them. I also included instructions on how they can link their RM CC3 Windows 10 systems to the OneDrive so they have OneDrive on their login profile rather than having to access everything on a web browser. All I can assume is that if they are not telling lies, something happened on their PCs which caused this to happen, and they were unaware. Maybe they accidentally pressed delete when a folder was selected within OneDrive on their explorer and a prompt didn’t show to say ‘Are you sure you want to delete?’.

 

Moving forwards, that’s why I thought separate shares might be best, but I am just worried, if I put three different shares in the Document root for the SharePoint site, there is no stopping someone highlighting all three and hitting delete on those. I am assuming the only other alternative would be to have three different SharePoint sites each with a share in the Documents? It seems a longwinded pain in the backside way of doing it, but just trying to do some damage limitation to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

It has been a very valuable learning experience which has been the only positive thing about it. Waiting a month for a restore has been very bad and thankfully, I had not deleted the local copy so ended up keeping that so staff have just been doing things the way they always did but I am keen to get them off of that as soon as I can, just worried this will happen again in the near future.

[chaplic]

I do lots of infrastructure migrations, fileservers and the like. Always someone says "ooh wouldn't it be good to ask users to tidy up". Always I push back saying it's a bad idea, users who do bother will spend a age deleting tiny files we dont care about. ​Alwayes​ someone conspires to lose a file and it's IT fault

 

I ​If you really do need to save space, as an admin find stuff that's large and low risk, OST files on the network. TempBackup.bkf etc.

 

But to your bigger point, sharepoint is terrible at doing things in bulk with lots of files. I'm currently one week into dealing with an issue where edge managed to create 1.4 million shortcuts into a document library that's used for desktop and it's a flipping nightmare. If your license allows for it, turning on retention policies can be handy, albeit doesnt help with volume.

[XiJ]

It might be after the horse as bolted but I make the new share / share point / storage folder and tell staff to save in there. Then I make the original ‘staff share’ read only with a deadline of when it will be deleted. If there’s anything urgent they need, I tell them to copy it over. I then archive the old share elsewhere - just in case I really need it when you get the “but it was urgent to my teaching and learning”

 

Always helpful to get SLT to back you up on this.

 

As for bulk ops, powershell is a great way to do this for 365. Tends to keep my go to for anything bulk.

 

And finally, audit files can be very useful for evidence of who did what when! There’s no arguing with them.

[Brax]

It might be after the horse as bolted but I make the new share / share point / storage folder and tell staff to save in there. Then I make the original ‘staff share’ read only with a deadline of when it will be deleted. If there’s anything urgent they need, I tell them to copy it over. I then archive the old share elsewhere - just in case I really need it when you get the “but it was urgent to my teaching and learning”

 

Always helpful to get SLT to back you up on this.

 

As for bulk ops, powershell is a great way to do this for 365. Tends to keep my go to for anything bulk.

 

And finally, audit files can be very useful for evidence of who did what when! There’s no arguing with them.

This is exactly what we've done. Set a deadline to make it read only and the final deletion. Tell them to put stuff in departmental teams and onedrives.

[psydii]

Hi all,

I was just wondering if anyone else has experienced this, knows of a better way of doing things?

 

Yes

 

You need to redesign the staff share and compartmentalise it into discreet Teams/Sites. This is absolutely one of those times where the technical people need to change the way the organisation works - and this requires close working with the key stakeholders to create a new way of working that is acceptable to all. They key drivers are data protection and business continuity, work with your DPO and a Dep Head/Business manager to lead it from this angle.

 

To restate how *we* do it:

 

We have a site/team for each department, which limits the scope of potential damage.

 

We have several communication sites for sharing documents read only with all staff (HR, Safe Guarding, IT Helpdesk, general school documents and stuff). Owners of the information are the Owners of these sites, All Staff are visitors. The PA / Office Manager / Business manager owns the general school documents site, and manages access therein at a folder level.

 

When a document needs to be shared outside of the owners/members group of the site, then it is done limited to the specific file/folder to a suitable azuread/local ad group. Mostly these documents are transitory and end up being shared directly from the member of staff who needs to collect the data's OneDrive.

 

 

This (and a similar set up for on premises folders) has limited the impact of accidental moves/deletes multiple times in the last 24 years.

 

FWIW that AD role/capability group design is a derivation of a method published in the Windows 2008 Resource kit book Productivity Solutions for IT Professionals by Dan Holme*. Dan went on to join the SharePoint team when they were remodelling SharePoint into the modern teams-centric (Owner, Members, Visitors) security model we see today.

 

 

*actually Dan's book was a pulling together of best practice that started with the 1996 Paper https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/Role-Based-Access-Control/documents/sandhu96.pdf and the 1997 NT-centric follow up https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/266741.266769

Edited February 12, 2024 by psydii

[talksr]

Thank you everyone for your contributions, they have been really helpful. I have gone head and broken down the staff shared area into several teams/sites and this has worked very nicely.

 

One thing I have noticed which maybe would have contributed to the original nightmare of masses of files going missing is that quite a few staff are utilising the OneDrive application on their computers rather than use the browser. If they make any relatively large changes, it seems to take a considerable amount of time to sync. I was looking on Friday and one staff member deleted some files from her own OneDrive folder in Explorer and the OneDrive app said there were over 35,000 files to be updated in its status.

 

Has anyone found a way to force the OneDrive application to keep everything off of the computer? We have a high speed broadband line, so we really don’t need for OneDrive applications to be storing large files and folders locally. I am wondering if this has been contributing to files missing etc as having over 35,000 files left to sync at 4:30PM in the afternoon on Friday is just not going to happen as the staff member would have soon been logging off, shutting down and going home.

[chazzy2501]

1up techmonkey post about synology boxes. I have 2 of these boxes going spare, I upgraded the storage to 4tb and used the o365 backup that has full instructions btw. This is by far the very cheapest way to backup office 365 and with weekly reporting. The interface is easy as well and you can (again with instructions and a template letter) backup teams conversations etc.

 

Really nice.

Edited February 26, 2024 by chazzy2501

[NegativeKillDeath]

Has anyone found a way to force the OneDrive application to keep everything off of the computer? We have a high speed broadband line, so we really don’t need for OneDrive applications to be storing large files and folders locally. I am wondering if this has been contributing to files missing etc as having over 35,000 files left to sync at 4:30PM in the afternoon on Friday is just not going to happen as the staff member would have soon been logging off, shutting down and going home.

 

 

Look for GPOs related to Files on Demand.