I posted this to our corporate Yammer site recently. I would urge all to read.

Yesterday I there was  a folder in my SharePoint directory under the Marketing folder called PAC Meetings.  I noticed there were two folders, one was called Product Advisory Council and that had some stuff in there too, I made a mental note that these two should be consolidated. I made a folder under the PAC Meetings folder called 7-29-2014 for oiur next meeting.  In that folder I created three files, one called was an Excel file called competitive analysis workshop, and excel file that Nicole  and I worked on together from 10-11.   Later I converted all the content in that file to a powerpoint to prepare for the PAC meeting workshop, that I called competitive workshop too.  I then created a PAC Meeting powerpoint file.  Made a presentation for the PAC meeting, and spent a lot of time typing the script, choosing words carefully for each slide. I worked until 8pm solid, breaking only for lunch.  Great output.

When I finally finished I went to find the location where I could share the file path with people.  I noticed something funny.  That path didn't exist on the shared documents directory in SharePoint.  I went back to get the documents from my SharePoint directory on my laptop.  The folder was gone.  The entire marketing folder in SharePoint had overwritten (they call it "synced") my personal marketing folder in my SharePoint directory.  I thought they always compared files and took the newest ones.  Apparently that is NOT the case, AND since the entire directory is gone not only did I loose the ten hours of work, several other folders which were within that folder (including the last PAC preso) are now gone.

I did nothing wrong here.  I was trying to be a good corporate citizen and use the cloud.   I have been keeping all my non-sensitive documents in my SharePoint directory and trusting the sync function to work.  It clearly does not, and I can only hope other stuff has not disappeared too.

I know this - I am spending the time I thought I would be spending on creating the demo mockup recreating the files I made during my ten hours of work yesterday.

I also know this - I am not going to immediately move all the files out of my SharePoint directory on my laptop, keeping my files locally,, and backing them up to a USB Hard Drive like I used to do.

Let this be a warning to others - do not rely on SharePoint, especially on your hard drive.