#How does microsoft onedrive work plus

open the document or file (once you’ve guessed correctly).To fully recover from OneDrive’s Version History you have to: You’re stuck with the ransomware fake name and a useless extension. The Version History lists the past file versions available and lets you restore or open the older document separately.īut, and it’s a huge ‘but’, OneDrive version history does NOT restore the original file name. When ransomware messed up the document, OneDrive kept the previous, readable contents automatically.

#How does microsoft onedrive work plus

That means a Word document becomes unreadable because it’s encrypted plus the file name and extension have changed too. You’ve been infected with ransomware and that has spread to your OneDrive storage because (as Microsoft strongly promotes) the computer files are synchronised to OneDrive. How OneDrive ransomware recovery doesn’t quite work In typical Microsoft fashion, it’s enough to promote an incomplete solution rather than improve their service so it truly helps customers. Microsoft hasn’t devoted any effort to upgrading OneDrive’s Version History to save and restore file names. It’s promoted as a malware restore feature, even though it doesn’t do a complete job. It also doesn’t allow for a change of file extension. Version History assumes that the name of the document doesn’t change significantly or maliciously. One part of OneDrive’s ransomware recovery is really their Version History feature rebadged for a purpose it wasn’t originally intended or designed for.

Why isn’t OneDrive’s ransomware recovery complete? However the less-obvious ‘Recover your OneDrive’ does restore both content and file names to previous states. UPDATE: we’ve updated this article to make clear the ‘Version History’ doesn’t recover file names. That makes recovery from malware a huge problem. It’s the file name/extension change part that OneDrive does NOT always recover from. For example a file 2021Budget.xlsx could become c. Ransomware blocks access to a computer or network data by encrypting the files and changing the file name / extension. We found that one feature works exactly as their carefully worded steps say, but misses out on an important element of ransomware recovery.

While updating our book Everyday Backups, we tested the OneDrive ransomware protections, not taking Microsoft’s word about how it works. One recovery feature works fine but the other isn’t complete. Microsoft promotes OneDrive as protection against ransomware however our tests show it’s not always as practical or complete as the company boasts.