I strongly suspect that MS implemented changes on Onedrive, in a family subscription, and that this caused years of photos being lost.
In our situation we had pictures folders that are called "Pictures" but shown with a local language name in MS Explorer. After the change by MS the "Pictures" folder is deleted from Onedrive and there is an actual folder named in local language. In my case years of photos are lost.
To prevent loosing files I have added a delete check to my Rclone-script.
As I understand it was not MS deleting your photos but you did it yourself.
I think the issue is that OneDrive is not really generic storage but some sort of service MS offers and within T&Cs you agreed with they sometimes change things. It is true that people piggyback and use it as a data store. The utmost care should be taken when doing it. The most obvious solution to avoid many issues is to store all your data in separate directory (ones provided by MS use for their services only) and use rclone crypt. I use it this way for many years without any surprises.
And regarding "In my case years of photos are lost". We all went trough something similar in our lives:) Good moment to take seriously 3-2-1 backup rule. No provider, software nor hardware is 100% reliable. It is not the question whether they fail one day moving all data into oblivion but when it is going to happens.
I took a quick look into your script, I highly advice against using sync for backup as it can lead to data deletion as you experienced. You can always use backup-dir flag to avoid deletions:
That way you could always restore your data and not delete anything.
As always, I highly recommend some kind of report being email actively monitor at least once a week to make sure nothing is broken.
Finally, as kapitainsky mentioned, the 3-2-1 backup rule. In particular for photos, I keep multiple backups in multiple different cloud platforms as I agree family photos is something I'm not willing to risk and lose.
Sorry this happened to you, I would also try and check your recycle bin and 2nd level recycle bin, maybe you are able to recover them.
@kapitainsky MS deleted the photos on Onedrive with some update. This can be traced back to email notifications from Onedrive. You can believe this or not. But I am 100% sure.
Thanks all for the responses. I now know that I need to be more careful to these services. Hope the little post can be warning for other fools like me.
I might be wrong indeed. But as OneDrive user for many years I find it difficult to believe. It is true that MS does a lot of questionable things with their services but never seen them deleting content at their whim. Could you please share email you are referring to? Does not have to be all. Just relevant paragraph. It would be very helpful for other OneDrive users.
And how it is supposed to protect you from MS deleting files? It only protect you from your script deleting things.
The purpose is to sync to a local drive. Now when there is a failure by MS it will stop syncing, and I still have all files local. I will get notified with an error and can investigate. I understand this is not a sufficient backup, but a nice protection against failure that can quickly restore.
The reason I know 100% sure it was MS is because the Onedrive e-mail notifications. MS sends a notification when many files are deleted. I have a few of those from earlier. Also MS send notifications to remember the day with links to photos from previous years. In those emails I can see that the notifications include links to older photos just two weeks ago. These files should be in the trash-bin, but they are not. I should have a notification about the massive delete, but there is none.
Ok. Not very convincing. But better safe than sorry. I have double checked that my backups are working and I would recommend everybody the same:) let’s see if we hear similar stories from other users.
@kapitainsky, what is not convincing? Daily emails by MS to files that do not longer exist, and should have been in the trashbin, since the 30 days are not yet expire.
So you think I accidentally deleted them myself, and then also deleted them in the trashbin just to make sure that they are really deleted?
Don't rely on MS Onedrive to keep your files safe!! This post is just a warning. I was also surprised, and off-guard, after many years enjoying the service.