Microsoft Onedrive Hidden .Trash folder

Question

Level 1

4 points

Microsoft Onedrive Hidden .Trash folder

Hi,

long story but essentially I have a user who was moving folders to the Onedrive-Tenant folder on their MacBook thinking that they were being safely sync'd to the cloud. However it turns out they weren't being sync'd. Now when we updated their Mac from Catalina to Ventura and consequently installed the new version of Onedrive the folders that they'd saved are no longer visible anywhere. Not visible on the Mac nor online in Onedrive.

After browsing to the /Users/username/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Tenant folder and running the ls -la command I can see there's a hidden .Trash folder located there of significant size.

My question is... is it possible to see and restore the contents of that particular .Trash folder? if so what commands are required?

Many Thanks

MacBook Pro (2017 – 2020)

Posted on Dec 10, 2023 5:36 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,210 points

Dec 10, 2023 6:42 AM in response to Ces_78

Open /Users/username/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Tenant and enter the shortcut, cmd-shift-. ← yes, that period is part of the shortcut.

That will show hidden files, but Finder will still hide some, like .DS_Store and the macOS .Trash folder, so I'm not sure if this will show the OneDrive trash folder. You may have to view the contents in Terminal.

Reply

Answer 2

Ces_78 Author

Level 1

4 points

Dec 10, 2023 10:07 AM in response to Barney-15E

Hi,

Thanks for the response, unfortunately, displaying hidden files in the GUI is only showing the folders that were actually successfully backed up to OneDrive, not the missing ones...

In Terminal using ls -la I can see the contents of the Trash folder but it's only showing 2 entries, both are named 'username' ...one has 1 dot after it and the other has 2 dots after it. I don't see the missing folders there.

There were literally hundreds of files there so I doubt they can just disappear, perhaps they are renamed and hidden somewhere else?

I've done a complete EaseUs File recovery on the disk and examined the resulting files but cannot locate any of the missing files in that File Recovery either.

Reply

Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,210 points

Dec 10, 2023 2:23 PM in response to Ces_78

In Terminal using ls -la I can see the contents of the Trash folder but it's only showing 2 entries, both are named 'username' ...one has 1 dot after it and the other has 2 dots after it. I don't see the missing folders there.

I don’t know what else to do.

username is not the folder name. It is the owner.

One . is shorthand for the folder you listed (.Trash) and . . is shorthand for the parent folder (username).

Reply

Microsoft Onedrive Hidden .Trash folder

Similar questions