Windows 10: Why does OneDrive have my personal photos and how do I safely delete them

I have disabled OneDrive on my new Windows 11 laptop.But I have just accessed OneDrive Online and discovered 100's of photos that I never uploaded or asked to be uploaded. They go back to 2004!, and many seem to be things I have viewed but never saved although most are in fact my own on my laptop.Some of them photos contain very personal data like driving licences, passports, etc.When I tried to select them all, using Shift, it only selected 101 and when I tried to delete I got the scary popup shown in my screenshot. Why does Microsoft do this without asking and how can I stop it ?

:)

 

Photos deleted from gallery, deleted on Onedrive

Hi Lrs1436,



Thanks for your post in Microsoft Community.



It sounds like your photos deleted from gallery have also been deleted on Onedrive.

First I suggest you try to check maybe the Deleted Galary on your phone to see if it's possible to get deleted photos back. Then you may try to visit the OneDrive website to see if the photos you synced are there. If not, you may follow the steps listed on this link | Find lost or missing files in OneDrive (microsoft.com) to see if they could be found back.



Feel free to post back if you need further assistance.









Best Regards,

Lynn Sun | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

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* Kindly Mark and Vote this reply if it helps, as it will be beneficial to more community members reading here.

 

OneDrive Personal Vault corrupt on Windows 11 Error Code: 0x8004100e

Hi Javier

I already did that. A couple of times. Most recently, as follow-on steps to your recommendation to delete my Personal Vault permanantly:

1. Followed your steps to permanently delete Personal Vault on OneDrive web
   
2. On my laptop:
   
   1. Disabled OneDrive backups
      
   2. Unlink this PC
      
   3. Uninstalled OneDrive application
      
   4. Deleted OneDrive folder
      
   5. Rebooted
      
   6. Reinstalled OneDrive
      
   7. Logged back in and retried Personal Vault - same error
      

 

Moving a photo to Personal Vault and then deleting it results in corrupt cache or db in Photos app

The original version of this post was confusing because I was working through the issue as I was posting. Here's the updated version after I worked through it and understood it.

What happened:

- I moved a photo to the Personal Vault on OneDrive

- Immediately after I deleted the photo within a second or two of moving it

- This resulted in the thumbnail and filename remaining cached in Photos but you couldn't delete it. The remaining entry for the photo showed in Collection but was just a thumbnail, the full size image wasn't there. If you try to delete it it would say "cannot
delete." Tried reboot, remove folders from Photos, sign out of photos, resync all OneDrive files, etc, etc. Nothing worked.

I couldn't tell if the problem was OneDrive, Personal Vault, or Photos. In the end I believe it was a combination of problems with Personal Vault and Photos.

I was able to reproduce the issue multiple times with multiple photos. Unfortunately, reproducing the issue eventually corrupted my Personal Vault. I couldn't sync OneDrive at all and had to disable personal vault. That solved my OneDrive problems, but the
corrupted entries in the Photos app remained.

There is no solution except to reset the Photos app and then re-index your whole collection. In my case this takes around 20 hours, so it is a horrible price to pay for hitting a dumb bug by mistake while exploring features.

If and when MS read this, some suggestions:

• In photos add the ability to force delete an entry in the database even if accessing the file errors out. Maybe if the user tries to delete a folder and you get some kind of error from the system give the user the option of waiting, or removing the entry
  from the database. This would have saved me 20 hours of indexing.
• In OneDrive, once a file has been moved to the Personal Vault make it inactive and immutable until enough time has passed for OneDrive to do whatever it needs to do. Apps and Explorer should be blocked from making any further changes or deleting the file
  until OneDrive is done. And add deleting a file within a second or two of adding to the vault on the client to your tests.