I tried to do an opening report in Chessbase and got a curious message that my reference database was missing. I look in the bases folder and indeed everything is gone. Now there should have been a couple of large databases like Megabase 2019 and 2020 there. They were there ten days ago when I looked at the directory. So what happened?

About a week ago I was poking around in One Drive which is a Microsoft service which comes with hotmail and possibly Microsoft Office. I noticed that it was backing up my chessbase folders which reside in my documents folder because of accepting the default installation. This seemed wasteful as it involves many gigabytes of data which I have backed up and could download from chessbase.com if it ever happened that I needed to reinstall it. I originally bought a deluxe version of chessbase 10 from Strategy and Games in Toronto and registered it and have been getting updates from Chessbase for the last few years. They always have a ridiculously inexpensive upgrade price to the latest version and I usually take them up on it. Anyway I applied brute force and deleted the One Drive files which backed up the Megabase files. And so the deletion propagated back to my computer and the files were removed from my computer. Argh!!!

It took a couple of minutes to restore the Megabase files and there don't seem to be any issues but I shut off the Onedrive backup function as it seems dumb to be moving so many gigabytes of data to the cloud when I could use my normal backup files to restore if it were ever to be lost from my newish computer.