I learnt the hard way to day that Microsoft SkyDrive (OneDrive) service doesn’t support Full Folder Restore from Recycle Bin. I was unfortunate to own a Dell Venue Pro 8 tablet, and right from the bat, I have discovered Dell cut corners with the device by integrating a sub-par Touch and Pen Digitizer in the product. I would have returned the device, but I am mesmerized by the screen quality of the device on an 8″ tablet, hoping Dell will eventually fix via Driver patch. This tablet would have been utopia if not for this buggy touch/pen interface.

The problem lies in the fact that when you Touch the screen to swipe, a click function follows arbitrarily on the device, So instead of doing a simple swipe, you end up moving things around inadvertently. And this is what happened while I was busy with SkyDrive in IE on the device. Instead of swiping to scroll, the tablet performed a drag and drop, dropping my Music folder into my Picture folder! I wasn’t aware of this move till this morning while trying to play music.

(MS PLEASE REMOVE DRAG FUNCTION FROM WEB INTERFACE OF SKYDRIVE!!!! Or make it optional. I want to intentionally perform Cut&Paste to move things around in SkyDrive, not drag them around by accident. Not good on a Tablet!)

So there I was this morning trying to move the music folder back in Windows Explorer on a local device, I shouldn’t have done that, I should have gone back to IE and move the folder back to its original location which would have restored my file integrity. But then, you never know till you know right? But then it is too late.

Moving the folder on a synced local device via Windows Explorer resulted in the original location on SkyDrive being deleted to Recycle Bin, and SkyDrive attempting now to sync my local changes back to SkyDrive. 10Gb of data in Total! And this have to be synced all over the place I’ve got SkyDrive synced; about 5 devices. So I did the inevitable, I went into SkyDrive Recycle Bin via IE and lo and behold all my files were there. So I thought to restore the Music root folder which should restore all child folders and files, well forget that. SkyDrive allows you to restore files/folders on one-on-one basis! So I have to manually restore almost 2000 records manually each to their locations. C’mon Microsoft, you can do better than this!

PLEASE ADD FULL FOLDER RESTORE FROM RECYCLE BIN.

Well the lesson is learnt. If you ever inadvertently move files/folders in SkyDrive, be wise, login to SkyDrive via your web browser and move file/folders back to original locations. Once they land in Recycle Bin, the humpty-dumpty cannot be put back together again; unless you have lots of time in your hand of course.