> I do all of my work on local C:\ paths and copy files to SharePoint or OneDrive only if forced to collaborate with colleagues.
This is an option I considered, but it's harder for non-power users to deal with the file management. It's very likely some users would copy files instead of moving them and it would quickly devolve into trampling each other's changes.
That Dropbox article was great, so thanks. If I had to summarize my issue now, I'd say it feels like the backup solutions have a poorly implemented sync engine. I'm guessing they simply get a stream of changes from SharePoint though and I wonder if it would even be plausible to think they could misapply those changes.
You're probably thinking along the lines of pointing a file level backup solution at the OneDrive folder, right? This isn't like that. They're commercial solutions that are configured as an Azure App, so they always work against the online data.
I know what you're saying though. If you took something like Arq Backup and pointed it at you're OneDrive folder, I don't know how it would work, but suspect it would fail with files-on-demand because it takes a VSS snapshot to get a stable point-in-time. I've never tested, but assume working off a snapshot doesn't trigger the download for files-on-demand and it would feel broken to anyone that doesn't realize what's going on.
That's a good observation, but unlikely to be related to what I'm seeing here.
I can't edit anymore, but want to clarify. Files are missing from my backups, not from OneDrive. The backup software fails to reproduce the data in OneDrive.
> Much of this discussion sounds like an inability to distinguish between first and third party products.
Yeah. Did I explain it badly or something? I thought I made it clear that I'm having an issue with 3rd party backup solutions and that it's possible they're using some shared API from Microsoft, but most people seem to be focused on OneDrive specific issues.
> Possibly related: A few weeks ago I was told to use the autosave option of MS word.
I don't think this would be related.
I have no reason to suspect any data loss from OneDrive. It's the backups that are failing for me. If I had to restore from backup right now, it wouldn't match what's stored in OneDrive.
> They designed it to look like a differential backup model
> Eventually, if no more changes were made to an item, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 will remove all versions of an item except the latest one.
I added the emphasis. I read that to mean I can expect the current point-in-time (aka right now) to be identical to my live data. I'm only trying to reconcile the most recent set of data, so that retention policy shouldn't make any difference, right?
> What the heck... Was I expected to extract the archive and go through all the files one by one (there are thousands of them) to check if every file was properly backed up?
There are a lot of silent pitfalls like that in my experience. For example, if you use folder level encryption with Synology Active Backup for MS365 it can silently mangle the file names due to path length restrictions. You'll end up with files that have "file name too long" as part of the file name.
That's why I'm trying to reconcile every file in this data set. I don't trust anything without being able to personally verify it at this point.
This is an option I considered, but it's harder for non-power users to deal with the file management. It's very likely some users would copy files instead of moving them and it would quickly devolve into trampling each other's changes.
That Dropbox article was great, so thanks. If I had to summarize my issue now, I'd say it feels like the backup solutions have a poorly implemented sync engine. I'm guessing they simply get a stream of changes from SharePoint though and I wonder if it would even be plausible to think they could misapply those changes.