Trials of a Network Admin

I ran into what is either a nasty bug or an undocumented “feature” in OneDrive for Business recently.

Let’s say you create a OneNote Notebook named “MyStuff” and then create a folder in the same location as the notebook, also named “MyStuff”; OneDrive will allow you to do this and on the surface there is no reason it shouldn’t. I managed to do this inadvertently, and the first sign something was wrong was that the folder itself was completely invisible in the OneDrive UI, or in the modern file dialogs within the Office suite. It was however perfectly visible from the old-style Explorer file dialogs, and I could access files without a problem so long as I used the older dialogs.

The real problem started when I tried to rename the folder and lost the ability to access any of the files contained within. After some investigation, what I found is that because of the file and folder sharing a name, when it seemed to me that I was saving to the folder, I was actually saving within the OneNote notebook, as if it was a folder. Except that the files were not there if I opened the notebook itself.

I’m not even sure what I did to get the files back, as rather than documenting the recovery process I was busy questioning why I hadn’t just saved to my NAS.

It seems as if somehow OneDrive created something like a symlink between the folder and file, and renaming the folder broke that link. I can’t imagine that this is deliberate behavior but these days one never knows.

So long story short…don’t do this!