Remember when we used to give physical photo albums to guests as a source of entertainment? Well, the world has evolved, and people are seemingly becoming more reliant on their phones to capture "Kodak moments" with their friends and family.
With the option to save and store your fondest and most treasured moments in cloud services like Google Photos, iCloud, Dropbox, or Microsoft OneDrive, it seems like a foolproof way to preserve these memories for an entire lifetime (or so I thought).
Recently, a OneDrive user took to Reddit to express their frustrations about Microsoft "randomly" locking their account without any substantial reason or warning. They further revealed that they were locked out of their OneDrive account shortly after moving "30 years' worth of irreplaceable photos and work" to the platform (via Neowin).
According to the user:
"I was consolidating data from multiple old drives before a major move—drives I had to discard due to space and relocation constraints. The plan was simple: upload to OneDrive, then transfer to a new drive later."
Perhaps more concerning, the user revealed that they've since submitted the compliance form 18 times, but the efforts have been rendered futile with an automated response that doesn't provide any meaningful aid. They continue:
"This feels not only unethical but potentially illegal, especially in light of consumer protection laws. You can’t just hold someone’s entire digital life hostage with no due process, no warning, and no accountability. If this were a physical storage unit, there’d be rights, procedures, timeframes. Here? Nothing. Just a Kafkaesque black hole of corporate negligence."
Always have a backup for your backup
Not to point any fingers, but a decision to move all of your old files from drives to a cloud storage service without having a physical backup is still risky. You could store them on an external drive for good measure; even the cheapest USB flash drives would be a good idea.
This way, when an unfortunate incident like the one shared by the Redditor occurs, you can easily access your treasured data from other points. To that end, it's still unclear why Microsoft locked the user's account, as it didn't provide any legitimate reason.
Hopefully, the user should be able to get through to a Microsoft representative or support agent to find a solution for the issue, and possibly trace the lost data buried somewhere in Microsoft's servers. Fingers crossed.
