Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this episode of Torah in Context: Lech Lecha, Nehemia and Lynell discuss the legend that Terah was an idolmaker, explore a famous rabbinic debate over how old Abraham was when he came to know his Creator, and uncover a hidden double meaning in the promise that all the families of the earth will be blessed through him.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Genesis 12:1-17:27
Joshua 24:2-3
Ezra 2:63; Nehemiah 7:65
Psalm 90:10
Numbers 24:5-9
Genesis 48
Babylonian Talmud Yevamot 63a
1 Kings 14:21, 31; 2 Chronicles 12:13
Exodus 20:24 (21)

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Torah in Context – Ancient Light for a Modern Heart – Episode 0
The Original Torah Pearls
Hebrew Voices #221 – Section Breaks in Hebrew Bible Manuscripts: Part 1
Hebrew Gospel Pearls PLUS Special – Tricks of Translation – Melchizedek: Part 1

The post Torah in Context: Lech Lecha – Episode 3 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this Shemini Atzeret teaching - Convocation vs Assembly, Nehemia and Lynell ask what the eighth day of assembly really is. Nehemia explains why the Hebrew phrase mikra kodesh means a time proclaimed to be holy rather than a “holy convocation,” and traces where that translation came from. He also shows why the King James made up the word “solemn,” and how Simchat Torah grew into a separate holiday that was never commanded in the Torah.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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VERSES MENTIONED
Proverbs 21:31
Leviticus 23:36, 39
Numbers 29:35
Nehemiah 8:18
1 Kings 8:65-66
2 Chronicles 7:9
1 Kings 12:32-33
Babylonian Talmud Megillah 31a; 29b
Leviticus 23:2
Nehemiah 8:9-12
Deuteronomy 14:22-29
Leviticus 23:4, 21, 37
Nehemiah 8:14-15
Nehemiah 13

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The post The Truth About Shemini Atzeret | 2026 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #254 - October 8th Jew Makes Aliyah: Part 1, Nehemia sits down with his niece, Maayan Gordon, who made aliyah to Israel in the middle of a war. Maayan shares how October 7th awakened her Jewish identity, the warm welcome she found at a Chabad event in Birmingham, Alabama, and how rediscovering the weekly Torah portion turned the commandments into vehicles for connection.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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VERSES MENTIONED
Jeremiah 2:13
Ruth 1:16-17

OTHER LINKS
LinkedIn - Maayan Gordon

The post Hebrew Voices #254 – October 8th Jew Makes Aliyah appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Torah in Context: Noach, Nehemia and Lynell uncover the Hebrew wordplay behind Noah's name, explore why flood traditions appear all over the ancient world, and close with a sobering account from Auschwitz and a warning not to ignore the signs of our own time.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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VERSES MENTIONED
Genesis 6:9-11:32
Numbers 23:19
Jeremiah 28
Exodus 34:6
Ezekiel 38
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Genesis 4
1 Samuel 16:13
1 Kings 13:2
Zechariah 6:12
Leviticus 19:17
Isaiah 54:9-10

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Torah in Context: Bereshit – Episode 1
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Hebrew Voices #186 – The Hamas Prophecy: Part 1
Hebrew Voices #241 – Nick Fuentes & the Serpent Seed Doctrine

The post Torah in Context: Noach – Episode 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Torah in Context: Bereshit, Nehemia and Lynell dive deep into the first verse of the Bible- Who created what? When? How long did it take? Let’s see what the original Hebrew and the commentators have to say!

I look forward to reading your comments!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Genesis 1:1-6:8
Genesis 10:10
Jeremiah 4:23
Jeremiah 27:1
Isaiah 46:10
Deuteronomy 33:21

RELATED EPISODES
The Original Torah Pearls

The post Torah in Context: Bereshit – Episode 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #253 – Seven Years of Work - Gone!, Nehemia Gordon tells how seven years of manuscript research, data from the Vatican, the British Library, and the Russian National Library, vanished when Microsoft erased his organization's OneDrive. He's joined by Hans Brender, known internationally as "Mr. OneDrive," and by computer engineer Lynell Gordon to explain the trappings behind it. Essential listening for anyone whose life's work lives in the cloud.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Hans Brender: … thinking about a political situation, thinking about this AI, that the government will cut off. We in Germany, we have to say, “Oh, you understand, that’s a political situation…”

Lynell: Right.

Hans: “… I have no chance to go through the data.” And on the systems, you have to say, “Google is in US, Amazon is in US.” So, for us, sometimes it’s better in a NAS system, because you have it in your house, and therefore you can also bring your data to the bank or something else and have it on a cold storage. So, that’s the best way.

Nehemia: So, I literally have an external hard drive in a safe deposit box now.

—

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with a couple of very unusual guests on a very unusual topic for this program. We’re going to talk today about a technology subject, OneDrive, and bear with me, you’ll understand why we’re talking about that. My guest today is Hans Brender. He’s known internationally as Mr. OneDrive. He’s worked with Microsoft technologies for more than 30 years, has specialized in OneDrive and digital collaboration for the past 15 years, and is recognized continuously as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional since 2013.

Today we’re going to discuss the risks that users often overlook, including something called Storage Sense (if you didn’t ever hear about that, you need to know what it is); files being dehydrated into online stubs, and what happens to your data when Microsoft disables or deletes an account. My wife, Lynell Gordon, is also joining us today. She has a degree in computer engineering and brings more than two decades of experience as the founder and CEO of a software company serving the vacation rental industry.

So, the reason I wanted to do this program, Hans… I’ve never had a guest talking about technology. I talk about the history of Christianity, of the Jewish people, of the Bible, of the Land of Israel, archaeology and manuscripts of the Bible. So, since 2019 I’ve been working with the… and you’re in Germany, if I’m not mistaken; I’ve been working with the BAM, which I always mispronounce the name, the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und prüfung…

Hans: Yes!

Nehemia: …in Berlin, the German Federal Institute of Research and Testing, and we’ve been working collaboratively. They’re the world’s top experts on using material science to analyze the inks of ancient manuscripts. And I am an ancient manuscript scholar, so our collaboration has been… they’ve got these powerful tools, but they’re like, “Okay, where should we point them, and what’s the significance of those results?” I don’t know physics, so I don’t have the ability to operate the machine and analyze the data. But when they give me that data, I could say, “Oh, you know what? There’s why this is really important.” So, we’ve had this really fruitful collaboration with the BAM scientists for seven years now. And a lot of that collaboration has taken place in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word docs, especially Excel, where they analyze this data. One day I get a message from someone who works in my organization, and she says, “I can’t access my Microsoft files.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s weird.” So, I go, and I say, “All of my files are gone.”

Hans: [Laughter]

Nehemia: Seven years of work has disappeared. And I’m like, “Okay, what’s going on?” And the long story short of it is that Microsoft had given my organization a free OneDrive account, and they decided to phase out that free program to what we call ‘non-profits’ in the US.

Hans: Yeah, NGO.

Nehemia: And I said, “Okay, no problem. I’ll pay for it.” So, I paid for it, and they still erased… all of my entire organization’s OneDrive, they erased. And I’m like, “Well, why would you erase that?” They said, “Oh, because that’s a different license you have now. That OneDrive belonged to the old license.” And I’m like, “This is seven years of research. Where is it?” And this basically ate up a month of my life. In the end, I got all the data back through, I believe, a miracle, and some of the amazing efforts of my wife.

And I’m going to show you a photo here that will be the focus of this discussion of why we need to have a discussion with a computer expert. Why do people interested in the history of the Bible care about this? Here’s why you should care. This is my wife sitting in a hospital bed. She had had chest pains and was admitted to the hospital and was about to have heart catheterization. Turns out that her heart was perfectly fine, as far as this issue was concerned. But she’s waiting for the heart catheterization, she’s on my laptop trying to find my files because, lying in the hospital bed, she got a message from a Microsoft VP: “We’ve restored your data.” But she sat in the hospital bed for two-and-a-half hours looking for where they had restored it to, because he said, “Well, we didn’t put it in the main place, we put it in a repository.” Where that was, she basically had to figure out. I then went home and spent the next four- and-a-half hours actually trying to get the data, but then spent the next week getting other data from my organization, which we’ll talk about.

So, this is the theme of today. You think you have a file in the cloud and it’s safe, because, I mean, the cloud is safe, and maybe it’s deleted from the cloud. There should be a local copy, but there’s something where Microsoft may, and you’ll explain that, because I told this to my wife, and she told this to some experts and they’re like, “This can’t be true.” Microsoft deletes it from your computer without you knowing it. And maybe you should have known it, but you don’t.

And so, there’s an interaction between these different systems that the average user doesn’t know. Look, and I have a guy in my organization who, I ask him to copy and paste something, and he’s like, “How do I do that?” I said, well, you hit Control-C.

Hans: [Laughter]

Nehemia: So, my wife is a technologist, and she had trouble with this. So, we need someone… there’s people out there whose lives depend on their data. Like, it’s their life’s work, and their livelihood for sure depends on it. And they don’t understand that their data might not be on their computer and it might not be in the cloud. And then, I was talking to a Macintosh person, he said, “Oh, we have the same problem, and it’s worse, because the Macintosh, I can’t just save it to my local hard drive, because if I have a four… Like, I have a four-terabyte hard drive on my computer. Macintosh, that would cost you like, I don’t know, $20,000, if it exists.

Hans: Yeah.

Nehemia: All right, so, talk to us about data security here. And I’m not even talking about hacking, I’m just talking about how Microsoft could delete your data, and you think you have it.

Hans: Yes.

Lynell: First of all, let’s talk about how it’s possible that we have data on our computer and we have stubs for pieces of data that we didn’t necessarily put in OneDrive.

Nehemia: Let’s start with the stub, and what’s a stub. Let’s start with that, Hans. That’s important.

Hans: Okay. The thing is that you have sometimes in your notification area, in your Windows system, you have a gray or a blue icon. The blue icon is a professional thing, and the gray icon is a personal thing. That I have to declare first. If you have…

Nehemia: So, in other words, there could be two OneDrives. I have two OneDrives; I have one that’s for my personal email and I have one that’s for my organization, exactly.

Hans: I have five.

Nehemia: You have five? I didn’t know you can have…

Hans: You can have up to nine professional and one personal.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Hans: Because your personal is your personal stuff.

Nehemia: Right.

Hans: You make pictures, you make something, it has nothing to do, and you have started with the personal thing, maybe. So, that was free in the past, and now they changed it a little bit, the rule. The thing is, if you have some pictures that’s not normal, maybe from your kids when they’re small. You are on the beach, and you see there is a spot, you have only less clothes on (let’s talk about this stuff) then in this personal, there is a robotics automatically that the people are looking for porn or porn-like pictures. Microsoft is doing that.

Nehemia: I’m sorry, who’s doing that?

Lynell: Microsoft.

Hans: No, no, no. Microsoft is doing it. You have written, underwritten… if you have personal, then you have seen the sign that they are looking for pictures that are not allowed. And porn is not allowed at Microsoft. Let’s say it’s a… they’re looking for these pictures. And sometimes it could happen that you see… normally there are millions and millions of pictures on it, millions of millions of OneDrives. Because Microsoft starting with this technology first in this personal stuff. So, they make no process if they find the picture, it must not be true. But you see, blue icon, blue things, and a person who has less only on the beach. That means it says, okay, it could also be your house, the kids in the bathtub. So, that’s the same thing.

Nehemia: You don’t see nothing. If you have your two-year-old in the bathtub, Microsoft might delete that image because they think it’s illicit.

Hans: Not delete.

Nehemia: Oh, they don’t delete it.

Hans: They’ll stop you. There is no process that you have to be out, there’s no process at Microsoft for this stuff, because you have signed it that you do not do. And Microsoft, sometimes they hold it, okay, you have a good chance in the past, but that’s a surreal… I know some people here in Germany, they lost here completely gamification with Microsoft with this account. They stop your account; you cannot have the data back.

That will not happen in the business software; it’s in blue. Business software means you have a little bit more, or you pay for that. Let me say, the thing is, if you pay for them, then you have a process in there when something has happened. So, normally (and it starts very, very long ago) the thing is that they see, okay, how can we store as much as possible and more documents on your computer without having a one terabyte drive?

Nehemia: Okay.

Hans: I have more than one terabyte, but I have only a local disk for 256 gigabytes. Why should they do it? First, if you have OneDrive and you see the files in there have a sign where you see nowadays. So, that means, if you have it from your position and you share it with other persons, they will also have the same information.

But first, if you have it in OneDrive, that means it’s in OneDrive, but there is also a cloud area there. If you have your Wi-Fi or something else on, that means it would absolutely synchronize to the cloud. And now it’s different: the cloud is the main thing. Your computer is not very interesting for you anymore. Because if you lost your computer, you go to your wife’s computer, take your account and say, okay, in the browser, because you have all files also in the cloud, and you can access them. New machine, new cloud, credentials in there, and they come back. That’s the interesting stuff. That’s the compete with hydrate and dehydrate. Normally, if you see the soccer games, they make a hydrate break. We don’t have that in the formerly days. Okay, it’s now very hot also in Germany, but hydrate and dehydrate, as I first see that, I have to say, “What is that?” That means you can have 3, 5, 10 gigabytes, 10 terabytes; it takes no space. Only if you, say, make a double-click of a document, let’s say it’s a Word document, you see the name. The name is also in there. And if you make a double-click, it says, “Okay, now they dehydrated from the cloud to your computer.” It opens Word. If it’s an Excel file, it opens Excel.

And you can say also there are three states. Cloud available only, that’s only the cloud, takes no place on there. Local available is local, that is the question mark, the thing, the green mark, you see that? And the full green circle means it’s always available. Because there are some rules in there, and these rules mean you can have it and say, “Okay, after 30 days of no access of the file, it will be dehydrated and says, okay, it makes no place on your machine.” If it’s locally available, half green, or full available, has full access, it means it’s on your machine, it takes place.

But you do not have all the things. And if you have… about Storage Sense, Storage Sense is for your machine, comes with Windows 11, or Windows 10, in the past, and you can have some rules in there. That means after, let’s say, 10 days it will be dehydrated automatically.

Nehemia: Can I translate into plain English? Guys, listen, this is the most important thing from my perspective in the podcast, and Lynell, you’ll jump in here, too. Dehydrate means…

Hans: Dehydrate is coming from the cloud back to your machine.

Nehemia: I’m going to put it in simple terms, as a humanities person, not a technologist. Dehydrate means Microsoft erases the file from your computer. You don’t have it anymore.

Hans: Nope.

Lynell: No.

Hans: No, hydrate, hydrate. Dehydrate is coming back.

Nehemia: Oh! But how do you end up with a stub? Is that hydrate or dehydrate? So, in other words, here’s what happened. I saved these files initially in the cloud and I wasn’t actually syncing to my computer. That was, I thought, a mistake. And then my wife said, “Well, I didn’t do that. I have everything synced.” She moused over the little thing, and it said synced and backed up.

Hans: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, she says, “I have all my files.”

Hans: Yeah.

Nehemia: And I went to back up her files…

Hans: Hmm, not…

Nehemia: … and I found out that some of those were only stubs, and the actual file was in the cloud, and the cloud had been deleted. These were files she never saved in OneDrive, had nothing to do with OneDrive, except OneDrive controlled her Documents folder.

Lynell: Let’s come down another level. What a dehydrated file is, guys, and why you may have this on your computer, and why Nehemia wants to do this show, because these are files that are basically on demand. So, like, in your Downloads folder, if you haven’t used a file in like 30 days, it will, quote unquote, put it up in the cloud, okay?

So, the file lives entirely in the cloud, and what’s on your disk is like this little placeholder. It’s like this little note card. And that note card says the file name, the size of it, the thumbnail… it actually shows you a thumbnail… and the metadata, which it takes up zero space for that.

Hans: Yes.

Nehemia: And that’s called a stub, correct?

Lynell: Okay. Yeah. Yes. And he’s talking about green, and he’s talking about checkmarks. If it’s locally available on your machine, then you have a green outline check mark on your machine. And that means you opened the file at some point, so OneDrive downloaded it, or hydrated a full copy to your disk.

You can also set up… there’s a setting where you can say, always keep this on your device. So, basically, like you’d pin a photo somewhere, or you’d pin something to a board… Remember when we used to have boards and we used to have those little stick pins? So, it pins it to your drive no matter what. So, that’s really hydration and rehydration.

Now, let’s talk about why they did it. They’re not an evil company; they’re not trying to do something bad to you. Years ago, we used to have important programs that we used to clean up our hard drives, right? And we would manage some temporary files that were sitting there in a temp folder. Remember when you used to have to delete your recycle bin? And we don’t have to do any of that anymore. They created this system so that it deliberately doesn’t touch your program files. It doesn’t touch your documents out of downloads (this particular part I’m talking about was Storage Sense, okay?) or system files that you might need for recovery. It knows those files. This is a Windows thing. This is different from OneDrive; this is Storage Sense.

So, one of the things that I didn’t know is that it does leave these stubs if you have them up in the cloud on OneDrive. Like, I use my Downloads folder for everything. So, I know a lot of people don’t. I do. It’s a habit from years and years and years of working on my computer. So, these things that I had in Downloads… I actually have a Downloads folder syncing with OneDrive, of course, because I use it all the time for everything. So, that’s why mine were gone, Nehemia, not just…

Nehemia: No, I understand that. In other words…

Lynell: So, when I went to click and find that file, I clicked on it and my OneDrive had been deleted. Now, I have two professional OneDrives that are blue, because I work for another very, very large company, and I have our Makor files, which are the ones that were done. And I just want to also be fair in saying that Microsoft had a grant. There was a grant that was given. The grant basically provided monies for nonprofits to have these services. And so, it was a good thing; it was something nice that Microsoft did. It wasn’t anything… And when the problem happened, when the grant ran out, the notification to all these large nonprofits, small nonprofits, doesn’t matter how big you were… when that grant ran out… and we got those through very large organizations like TechSoup and large companies that help non-profits.

Nehemia: And for those overseas, a non-profit is something in America like a charity.

Hans: But let me clear a little bit. The most important thing is, you share your documents not from your PC.

Lynell: Right.

Hans: The first thing you have to say, you write a document and you save it in OneDrive. Then it’s local and will automatically sync to OneDrive in the cloud; or, if a professional, to SharePoint. That’s another thing, but it’s the same technology. That means now it lives in the SharePoint or OneDrive in the cloud. And then you can say, “Okay, I need place,” and therefore I was like, okay, I hydrate or dehydrated, that’s the thing. But when you share a document, it will be shared from OneDrive in the cloud, not from your PC. If you say I share it, and make stop my laptop and go it out, it will share… If you share it with me, and I come later back, it’s shared from the cloud. So, that’s the first thing that we have: sharing…

Lynell: Yeah. And that sharing is so important because the most important files that were lost were collaborative files that Nehemia had with other scholars, other scientists, overseas, everywhere around the world.

Hans: Yep.

Lynell: All of those were gone.

Nehemia: And just to give the audience an understanding… So, we had a research trip to the Vatican Apostolic Library in the Vatican, in Rome, and that trip cost, overall, tens of thousands of dollars to carry out. Flights and hotels…

Hans: Yep.

Nehemia: … and there was a machine brought from Berlin with its own driver, right? So, we then got the results of that data, and we’re working through that data collaboratively over months, and that data just disappeared and it was gone. And again, so, Lynell was explaining; this wasn’t the personal OneDrive, it was a business OneDrive that was…

Hans: Okay, the business OneDrive was an NGO…

Nehemia: It was an NGO, exactly. It was given for free, and then they said, “Okay, we’re canceling it, so you’re going to have to start paying for it.” So, number one, I paid for it.

Lynell: Perfect.

Nehemia: Number two, we had a message saying that, “No, actually, you have it until March 2027.” So, we were given two contradictory pieces of information.

Lynell: Three contradictory; we got an invoice that actually said it was paid through the end of June 2026, June 25th of this year.

Nehemia: June 2026. This happened in June. Right.

Hans: Yeah.

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: In other words, every month we were getting an invoice saying, “No, you don’t owe us anything. You’re good through March 2027.” And there was a hidden message saying your data’s going to be deleted on a certain date.

Lynell: It was hidden.

Nehemia: It was literally a hidden message. And there were organizations much bigger than mine who lost their data and didn’t get it back. So, this is irrecoverable cultural heritage data that was produced by multiple scientists and scholars in collaboration, and travel, and crunching numbers, and calculations, and it was just deleted. And the craziest thing is, when Lynell said, “Well, my data is all here. Mine says it’s synced and backed up.” That literally was a message; synced and backed up.

Hans: So, yeah…

Nehemia: And so, she goes to a file and it says 180 megabytes. And I say, “Yeah, but right-click and do Properties.” It’s 180 megabytes. Size on disk: zero.

Lynell: Zero bytes.

Nehemia: And that was a shock to her.

Lynell: It was. I was so surprised, because I mean, I’ve been using Microsoft technology for my businesses that I built. I’ve used them for 20-something years myself, personally managed them with my IT department; never had an issue. Really surprised. I mean, I have been a Microsoft and a PC person almost all of my life. I did try Mac…

Nehemia: So, imagine this scenario, because this happens to me: I fly across the world to give a lecture at a conference, and I go to double-click on my PowerPoint, and my PowerPoint doesn’t open because I don’t have a Wi-Fi connection in some hotel somewhere.

Hans: Yeah.

Nehemia: This never happened to me, but it could. And why is that? Because it’s only a stub.

Hans: Yep.

Nehemia: Well, I haven’t accessed it in 30 days because I gave that lecture two months ago, and now I’m giving it again. So, that must happen all the time. I mean, how is that…

Hans: First, you have to say, go with the aircraft in another country, wherever, or in US, you can also say, okay, from Chicago to Seattle, whatever. Always you have to look. If I do that… I was delivered to have some sessions in… it was before the time in Hong Kong. So, flying over all, all this stuff was I have is to use… I do that, always available. With these files, I will show, it’s still there and nobody, all your rules with the stuff will not behave.

If you say it’s locally available, it will still, tomorrow, be the end of your life or your hard disk. So, that is the thing we have to know. But it’s still in progress. If you change… there are some other things what we know… linking. If you share with me a Word document, and we are working on those subset… so, I do that with the new company. I have retired, but I have built a new company, Epa4Y. That’s electronics we make for health, some stuff here in Germany. And it’s very interesting to have all this stuff with AI inside and so on.

But to write something with a simple document, I write them, I share it with you and your wife. Perfect. Now we have three states. She says, “Okay, I have no time, therefore it’s still in the cloud only.” She has not done, she sees in the folder or something else, but it’s still only in the cloud. If she will work, she has to click on it.

But now you have to say, we also have a different thing. That means that we have a history of a file. If you say, I found a file, and write something, you generate a new history. We can work together over the ocean. I have worked with the stuff around the globe, or immediately, if you have a good internet connection, you see I’m in the first paragraph, you are in the second paragraph, you see your cursor, it will run. So, therefore that is very interesting, but we have to generate also new versions.

So, sometimes if I see I have a bad connection outside, I have to say, “Okay, that’s not my last status. I have another one.” So, I have to look for the new one and have to re-pay. That means the OneDrive versions in it, each document, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, have this. So, that is…

Nehemia: Can I restore the older versions?

Hans: That’s all the older versions of a document, only of a document. You can fill them. Let’s say, I can display it 14 days ago, this day, if people have worked on it, and you can see that. That’s the history. That’s all very, very interesting. But the thing is, if you say… we have started again from the beginning. If you write a document and share it with us, you have it on your machine. It is all going to cloud, and we still have only the stub if we do not work on it. But you can have it also in a different… you can have this OneDrive files in the browser. You have to login with your credentials, look for OneDrive, see that, and now you’re working in a browser. That’s the original state where the files originally located.

So, now, start the next sequence. You may give OneDrive a Word document but you get inside a browser and use their Word in the browser and generate a file. And you say, okay, you have it in your files in OneDrive, and it’s immediately after you have created on your machine. But not with the green icon or the full green icon, it’s a cloud symbol, because you have generated in the original place where the OneDrive files are located. And if you save it from there, then we have four versions. One, it’s in the cloud, you have it locally, but it’s not physical there, it’s only the stub. Your wife have it on the stub and me have it on the stub. Because this file was generated in there, in the cloud, with the cloud machine. So, therefore it’s very interesting, and that could also be not the problem with the NGOs. That you have to say to Microsoft… and which vice president was it that help you to get the data back?

Lynell: His last name is Glover. He was… I’ll find it, one second.

Hans: Okay.

Nehemia: And here, I want to give credit to Microsoft, because my understanding from what my wife was told is, didn’t they have, like, multiple VPs who were trying to get this data back? Because they understood, “Wait, this is stuff from the Vatican, the British Library, the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. It’s irretrievable cultural heritage…”

Hans: Yeah.

Nehemia: “… that’s been destroyed.” And we got everything back.

Hans: Yeah.

Nehemia: And so, I really want to give them credit. I wish I had understood it better. Right now, I’m going to share my screen here while she’s looking for that.

Hans: Ah!

Nehemia: Here are Microsoft files. So, for example, here’s Codex Vaticanus. We went to the Vatican in September 2022.

Hans: Only the status is very interesting. You see the status is green. Full green.

Nehemia: The status is green because I right-clicked after I got it back. I right-clicked and I chose always keep on this device for the whole folder.

Hans: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because if I hadn’t done that, it might say, “Hey, you haven’t looked at Codex Vaticanus in 30 days.” The last time I worked on it was May 7th, 2026 at 4:22 a.m. I think I was overseas.

Hans: So…

Nehemia: And so, it would say, “Oh, I’m going to remove that from your computer and leave it in the cloud, because you’re almost out of space.” And I am almost out of space.

Hans: Stop, stop, stop, stop! I have to say something.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Hans: Because now you have a chance to a real backup. All the files are available on your machine from this folder. That means now you put a stick or something else in your machine and say, “Okay, make a backup of the files.” That means these are all on your machine.

Nehemia: Yeah. So…

Hans: And then you can say, okay…

Nehemia: But I only did that after I got my data back. I didn’t know beforehand. I thought I had done it before my data was deleted, but what I had done is backed up a bunch of stubs.

Hans: The symbol was different.

Nehemia: Right. So, I backed up a bunch of stubs and thought I had the files, but I didn’t. So, my wife had a podcast she recorded like a year ago, and it was a series of MP4 and MP3 files, had nothing to do with Word or Excel. Right? So, you’d think it’s not related to OneDrive. But Storage Sense said, “You know, you’re running out of space on your two-terabyte hard drive, I’m going to leave you stubs so that you’re not filling up your whole computer.” And she didn’t realize that. All right, what do we see?

Hans: So, you see on this machine, four blue icons.

Nehemia: Oh, this is your computer. Okay.

Hans: Yeah. And you also see a personal computer, I have to say, okay? Now, we know this was an NGO thing. And you see also that I have these folders. That’s my company, that’s a tenant for programming. That’s my personal OneDrive. That’s OneDrive for my new company, and that is for, I told you in the beginning, what we are doing. Therefore, you have more than the tenants, but you see, this is most important. I have, although, in this shortcuts. You see, I can do what I want. It’s all always in the cloud. I know the rules. Therefore, this is different.

Nehemia: So, let me ask you this. The British Library was hacked about two or three years ago, and specifically, they had hundreds, maybe millions, of images of priceless manuscripts, and they were hacked. And those images were deleted from their website, and it hasn’t come back in two or three years. So, you are trusting your company here, and maybe it’s okay, but you’re trusting your company here to Microsoft with no other backup than their cloud, that it won’t be hacked or that it won’t fail. Maybe it’s a physical device somewhere that might fail. Is that possible?

Hans: The thing is, that you can trust if you know the rules. Normally, I have a lot of PowerPoints, because I train people, midsize companies, enterprise companies, about OneDrive. And it takes four half-days, 750 slides, about OneDrive and SharePoint and what you can do with this stuff.

Nehemia: Okay.

Hans: So, it is not certain. You asked me before, we have today, why is the name of Mr. OneDrive? So, there was a story about that the people… I came back… no, I have to tell you. So, the MVPs have the chance… we got not paid for Microsoft, we got nothing.

Nehemia: What’s an MVP, for the audience who doesn’t know?

Hans: Most valued professional, not an MVP player, that you see with the NFL, no, no, no, no, no.

Nehemia: So, Microsoft has a status called MVP, okay.

Hans: Yes, there are about 4,000 around the globe, in all countries. One is for Azure, one is for SharePoint, one is for that, that’s different, each specialist. So, and I came back. We have the only thing what we can do, or what we get from Microsoft. I say it very clearly: we can go once a year for one week and get the latest news from Microsoft for the next half year, personally on the campus. So, I know what’s coming up.

So, to see here, if you have a document, whatever it is (I have to look for something) and you say, “Okay, I want to share these documents.” That means share, and you see that is not available this time. That means sharing. And you see that’s a little bit different, because it’s going to the cloud now, but it mustn’t see… That’s a cloud picture of that. And if you share something and you will do that also, you can have that. Let me look for a demo, what I want to show you…

Nehemia: But here, for example, you have something with a green check, and that green check means it’s only on your computer and not in the cloud. Is that right? The Notizbücher?

Hans: Notizbücher?

Nehemia: Yeah. That’s only on your computer and not in the cloud, right?

Hans: Yeah. Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, so…

Hans: If you see the blue icon… okay, go on, we have to go…

Nehemia: So, if your computer dies and the drive is irrecoverable, that file’s gone; it’s not in the cloud…

Hans: This file is locally available, but the rules we have mean that after different days it will be gone and it’s only in the cloud. Now there are my rules. I trust Microsoft, but I know the rules.

Nehemia: You understand the average user who doesn’t know how to copy and paste and certainly doesn’t know what Storage Sense is… Look, my wife spoke to a very advanced programmer at a very large multi-billion-dollar company, and she asked him about this. And he said, “You know, I was once in an airport, and I clicked on a file that wouldn’t open and I always wondered why that was.” This guy is… what would you call him? A full stack programmer, Lynell?

Lynell: A hundred percent.

Nehemia: And he’s a full stack programmer (for people who know; if you know, you know) and he doesn’t understand fully the rules. What chance do I have?

Lynell: So, what chance, not just us…

Nehemia: I’m a humanities person with a PhD, not a computer scientist.

Lynell: Okay, so the person… I will tell you about what happened, and how we got our data back…

Nehemia: …because here we have to give Microsoft a lot of credit.

Hans: Yeah.

Lynell: For sure.

Hans: And sometimes, I come back, and was at the campus one day, and there was a new manager, and the people say, “Okay, hey, look, that’s Hans. Hans is coming from Germany, he knows all about OneDrive.” That was 10 years; I started at the beginning for collaboration and all this stuff. And he says, okay. And after a year later, he says, “Okay, now I give you a name, Mr. OneDrive.” So, that’s not normal, because I was the first one who got all the flack for technical reasons with OneDrive. Therefore, all around the globe know me as Mr. OneDrive.

So, I make some stuff around the globe, whatever, in different countries, and tell them the story. Therefore, the MVPs are there, the community, it costs nothing, companies have to pay. You understand? That’s like an NGO… and not an NGO. If an NGO, it’s cheaper, or was cheaper, but a minimum, and therefore it’s done. The thing is to learn about this, because in an NGO you have not only OneDrive, you have a little bit more, and therefore…

Lynell: Explain what an NGO is. Non-government organization. What is an NGO?

Nehemia: Yes, NGO is what we call a non-profit. Non-government organization.

Hans: Non-government organization. Sorry.

Nehemia: No, it’s fine.

Lynell: That’s okay. I just thought we might want to put that in there.

Hans: And therefore, this has to learn, because you have to do management. Last week, I got also a message from Microsoft. We got some information; there are licenses about what we can do because we can test it a little bit earlier. So, that means we have an E3 license. That’s a license that costs money, normally, and you have to pay. I have my company here. I have also to spend the money, but my tenant, that calls all the stuff behind, with exchange, with mail and all these things, there is there.

And this week I got a message: it will be also you lost the system with Teams, so for Teams client. But they also say later on, you have also this and this and this. But the line above says, you lost your system, you will lose your system. And I was a regular… what, what is the hell here is it? So, something you have to read about that. Go inside, look for the management tools, look what’s there.

It was only Teams one client, because Microsoft lost during the sensitive things what I have in their Teams for me. I have no idea why. But I have another team for these tenants, but they give me one, and this is now from a trial machine and will be gone; that’s done. But that was from a system, you cannot read that. That’s what I want to say, although me, I was shocked first. And then I read it slowly, because my English is not so perfect, that I have to say, “Oh, I read it like my German ones.”

So, I learn a lot and make with Microsoft several things. Normally they give out the information… I have the last two years, although, give Microsoft a lesson. I was, and I have to say, “That’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong,” as a lawyer and something else. And they fix it for me. In the States, if you have to go to learn.microsoft.com, you find all this stuff, and there was some errors there. Group policy, that’s the stuff that you will find. But I want to say, you can automate it a little bit more with Storage Sense; that’s the same thing.

Lynell: So, we are using group policy, we’ll go into that for just a second, but let’s first of all define some terms. Tenant. Tenant is not a person, it’s not a place you live. A tenant is a… when you get an account in Microsoft, your account is your tenant, and it’s where they store everything, and they call it that. So, when they deleted our… we were told that they had given us a new tenant, when we had…

Hans: Yeah.

Lynell: … but we weren’t.

Hans: You want all of you back? Yes.

Lynell: But they didn’t; they didn’t give us a new tenant. And you asked me who helped. Nehemia, I’m kind of lost here. I’m trying to help people understand this, and I honestly don’t know where to go here, so…

Nehemia: Why don’t you tell us the story of how we got it back? Why don’t you tell that story? Because that’s an amazing story.

Lynell: All right. The story of getting it back is amazing, honestly. So, I worked in software to start with, for Fortune 500 companies. So, I know how Fortune 500 companies run. There is a process you go through. We had a support process; everybody has a support process. I learned about this like at 10 o’clock at night. I reached out to Microsoft support, got someone, got a case going. Nehemia had already gotten a case going the day before. He’s pretty techie; he’s really good at things like that. So, we had two cases open. Nehemia’s case came back… and I was out of town at the time; Nehemia’s case came back and they said, “We can’t help you, sorry. You’ve lost your data.”

Hans: First level, first level.

Lynell: Okay. And then, well, I got first level as well. But the first level with me, when I got them, said to me, “Let me see what I can do.” The next day I flew home. I’m in front of a computer; I can really work. I have my computer with me, but you know, working remotely sucks, always. And so, what I did in this particular case (and guys, if you’re not techie, you can just tune this part out; the rest of it, I promise, will be an amazing story), I went into the DOS system, the Windows operating system behind…

Nehemia: CMD.

Lynell: I was using, yeah, I was using…

Nehemia: Or PowerShell, I think.

Lynell: PowerShell for sure, all the different PowerShell versions, to try to do these commands, because like you say, it lives up in the cloud. There are pieces that live on our computer, you know, they leave things on the computer to find things. Well, nothing could be found. They were like, “Well, just give it some time.” And I knew that was going to die, so I knew that first level of support had failed. Also, I think their first level of support is in the Philippines. They’re very, very nice, but level one support is level one support, I’m just going to say.

So, they bumped it up to level two support and told me they couldn’t help me, that we’d lost our data, basically is what happened. Now, in the meantime, I’d opened another ticket. You know, I’m going to open tickets until you tell me why I can’t get my data back. In the meantime, I also created a social media campaign. And in that social media campaign, I did all of our channels, but the most important one is LinkedIn, because most of my business contacts are LinkedIn. I’ve been in development this many years. And I had it up for about a week. We ended up with like 71,000 views on my post, and I targeted Redmond, Washington, part of the target, so people would see it in that area and hopefully someone would help me if they could. You know, and basically, I said, “We’ve lost this important information.” I can show you, I can share my screen, my post that I put up. And maybe that will help. Let’s come back here.

Nehemia: And for the audience, there’s no exaggeration in this post. It was actually much worse than what she said.

Lynell: I tried to be clear…

Hans: No, I understand it. You can show me. You look for that. I want to say, sometimes for a tenant there’s another method. A tenant is your apartment. You have your kitchen, you have your bathroom, you have all the rooms. And therefore, in a tenant, you have SharePoint. That’s a technology we can also start. There is a OneDrive there. There is all another stuff that we can do that. That means tenant is a big thing. And most of them, you use only a small portion of it.

Lynell: Our sites were all empty. Technologist to technologist: in our tenant, every single site was empty.

Hans: No.

Lynell: There was nothing there. I found one file. All right, so, this is what I did. I prayed an enormous amount and cried. We all cried and prayed. It was really… it was a very bad situation. So, I went and I actually posted on my network a plea for help. We have files from the Vatican, the British Library, the National Library of Russia, materials that existed nowhere else in the world. Guys, we had the data. We didn’t have the collaborative research behind it.

It’s one thing to look at a spreadsheet and see it; it’s another thing to analyze it and to write all your data, to collaborate with experts all over the world, have them put their input on it and have those type of files. All of those files lived in the cloud. “Do you know someone at Microsoft? Please DM me.” Well, that was pretty amazing. So, what happened was… let me make this larger, okay? Okay, I got…

Hans: Seventy thousand impressions. Wow.

Lynell: Yeah, let’s go down to the bottom. So, people were like… and this is the CEO at Microsoft, and people are reaching out to Microsoft. These are friends, and these are people I don’t know, too. Some of my friends, some of them I don’t know. Everybody was commenting for better reach. Now, this is interesting, I haven’t seen this one before. This was a week ago. Andy Glover. Andy Glover has been at Microsoft for 26 years. He is a VP. He hasn’t updated his LinkedIn, but he has been a developer. If you look at his LinkedIn. I thought it was a joke. Okay, he said, “DM me. I sent you a message.” So, he did DM me and told me he was going to help me. He wanted me to confirm our tenant… logo right here.

So, look at this. He’s worked at Microsoft for 26 years. He works on the team with OneDrive and SharePoint. And I was like, “Wow, we actually have a real person here. That’s amazing.” And so, I did reach out. I was like, “Please don’t be a scammer. Please don’t be a scammer.” But then I thought about this: what are they going to do? They can’t take any of our data, there’s nothing else they can get to, it’s already deleted.

So, I reached out to him, and he said to me, he said, “I wanted you to confirm your tenant.” And so, I confirmed that to him. Now, in my thoughts here, obviously they thought they found us already. They thought they knew who we were working with because I’m all over the internet, because I’ve been in technology all these years. So, they found Makor from there. I didn’t even mention Makor, but they found Makor from me, and they restored it.

Now, it obviously was in deep storage, cold storage somewhere, because it took a couple of days. But when he reached out to me… I saw it two days later, and I immediately reached out to him, and he replied immediately. And he said, “Confirm your tenant.” I did. And about 30 minutes later, he’s like, “Your data’s restored.” And I said, “Okay. Let me look.” It was nowhere to be found. There were no new sites that had been restored. There was the tenant that was there, the tenant that had been there. Looked through every single SharePoint file, looked through every single thing that was there, it wasn’t there. And he couldn’t tell me where it is. Actually, he said it might not have been restored in the exact same place, which I didn’t care. As long as it was there, I would find it.

And what I ended up doing is going into some old OneDrive files that had been shared up on the cloud, taking that URL, searching through that URL, even though when I clicked on it, it said File not found, 404 error… or no, it gave me another error. It wasn’t a 404, but it was basically a 404 error.

Nehemia: And by the way, the reason she was able to do that is they deleted our OneDrive. They didn’t delete any of the email, which was really interesting.

Hans: No, that’s a different storage.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: Yes, exactly.

Nehemia: So, I had shared a file with another colleague, and there was an email generated. That’s where she knew, “Okay, there’s this specific file.”

Hans: It’s only the link that will be transferred to their email. It’s only the link. That means it will point to your storage.

Lynell: It should point to the shared drive storage, but it didn’t. But I was able to hack the URL and find it.

Hans: What I have to say: normally you have done the right way. If you know me now, and it could be happen… so, I although have a direct connection to the OneDrive crew.

Nehemia: Well, you’re a good guy to know then, okay.

Hans: Yeah!

Lynell: And I want to say after this; Andy Glover was just so kind. He’s so humble. He’s an incredibly humble person. He is just wonderful and nice. And when I said to him, “I can’t believe this. I’m so… I didn’t expect to get the data back.” Let me just be real honest, Hans, I didn’t think we were going to get this data.

Nehemia: I didn’t think that either.

Lynell: And it was like it was miraculous. I did find out when I was… and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m in the hospital. You know, it’s not really easy for me to find this.” But he’s like, “no problem.” Here’s the thing that I found interesting. He said, “Since we’ve heard this problem, myself and other VPs have been working to get this data back for you.” And I do believe that, and I really believe that they do care. But something happened policy-wise, and I will say, just really honest, the person that made the decision to make that a cutoff date and not send out emails to all the email addresses you might have for a non-profit… because we did not use the Microsoft Outlook.

Nehemia: Even in the Microsoft email, there was no warning your data is going to be deleted. On the contrary, there was an invoice saying, “you’re in good standing”.

Hans: The thing is, long story short, I do the same for other people. So, normally I could look and they give me then, and I have to say, “Okay, first you have to open a ticket.” Because even if I have OneDrive to Microsoft directly, sometimes not only the big things, but sometimes small, where we have to say, “This is not working. This is not working,” and I make a little MP4 and then I give it directly to the certain person that are good friends now inside the OneDrive group, and they put it out and give it to the right persons, and there we help all the other people. That my MVP talk has nothing to do where I do find my money, so therefore it’s a different thing. But I know there are some engineers, and they do a lot of stuff that can help, because a manager has decided the wrong thing. That’s done.

And I know what they’re feeling, what you are feeling, yeah, that is okay. But sometimes, you have to help, and sometimes it’s good to have 70,000 people that you see what’s happened. That’s okay. I have only 15,000 sometimes. I’m not always. But the thing is to help the right people is also a good thing. The community can help, and that’s not the Microsoft thing. That’s not his doing work, but they do it, let’s say, as a garage project.

In the formerly days, if Microsoft has not 120,000 people, because he has only 5,000, they make really good software, most of them in the garage. So, therefore we talk about garage project. They do it in the evening. They’re going inside and say, “Okay, let’s do this and let’s do there.” And therefore, these people are… that’s people from the old stuff. The thing is, now they all will be fired, that I understand really, because they have the experience, they know where they can look. The new ones, and AI, cannot help. That is the wrong decision what Microsoft is doing right now.

Nehemia: So, I had already spoken to, you know, a scientist at the German Federal Institute of Research and Testing, and she said, “Look, we have all the raw data from those trips. It’ll take two or three years to…”

Hans: To collect it.

Nehemia: “… to re-process that data…”

Hans: Yeah.

Nehemia: “… to run the calculations and sift through them,” and we’re doing a lot of very specific technical stuff. But she said, “I’ll do it.” She told us this really moving story where the day before she submitted her PhD dissertation at the Max Planck Institute (and this is a few decades back) all of her data was lost from the server, and she had to reconstruct it, and it took her months. And in this case, it was multiple, multiple projects. It would have taken two or three years, but she was willing to do it. And that’s what I assumed was going to happen. But now we have all the data back, I’m going to say thanks to God, Max Glover, and my wife Lynell.

Hans: But you have to know; backup, as Microsoft speaking as backup, is only a separate thing. You have to know the old backup mechanism. Bring the data, part for part, on your machine, as you have done, make a backup on a separate disk, and then you can say, “Okay, now go back and live in the cloud.” Then you have real backup, and you can do tomorrow to go to Amazon or whatever you want. But something, that’s the best thing: do not move all things at Microsoft. I have to say that also.

Lynell: Okay, no, Hans, Hans, look, this is my recommendation. This is what we’re doing. You need to have a NAS. You need to have a local backup system; we have a NAS now.

Hans: Yep.

Lynell: But you also need to have your data in two of the three large data storage; Amazon, Microsoft, and I always forget the third one Nehemia…

Nehemia: Google Drive?

Lynell: Google! Yes. You need to have your data, and if this is really important business data, you need to have it in two of those three. Also, you probably should have it in, like, a cold storage place…

Hans: Yep.

Lynell: …something like, not S3 at Amazon, but something like Glacier, or even the deeper one than Glacier, the colder storage than that. Yes, it may take you anywhere from nine to 48 hours to get your data back, but your data will always be there. Now, let me say this too. Microsoft does have other options in SharePoint, and other options where, like, right now I pay for a system that automatically backs up Nehemia’s data from the OneDrive to another system. I don’t think that Microsoft’s going to go down, I don’t think Amazon’s going to go down, and I don’t think Google’s going to go down. I think pieces of that may go; we’ve seen that.

Hans: But thinking about a political situation, thinking about this AI with several the government will cut off. We in Germany, we have to say, “Oh, you understand? That’s a political situation…”

Lynell: Right.

Hans: “… I have no chance to go through the data.” And all the systems, you have to say, “Google is in US, Amazon is in US.” So, for us, sometimes it’s better in a NAS system, because you have it in your house, and therefore you can also bring your data to the bank or something else and have it on a cold storage.

Nehemia: So, I literally have an external hard drive in a safe deposit box now.

Hans: Yeah!

Nehemia: Now, I’m not going to go there every week, because it’s not practical, but then I’ll only lose six months of data and not seven years.

Hans: Do it a quarter, make some sessions for that, and then bring it on. Then it’s okay. Normally, it’s only done a quarter of a year, and not a half of a year or your whole life. But that’s a learning situation.

Nehemia: … external hard drive, Lynell?

Lynell: I have more than one external hard drive now.

Hans: But you have also to say, “Okay, thinking about my new company, that’s security per security per security,” because it’s your data about your house, and I cannot storage at Microsoft. Even I have to secure the data inside Microsoft with Purview. So, that’s very critical; you cannot have a system to manage the data there. That’s absolutely completely, and I have not known that. That is okay, I have to learn about all this stuff, and it’s complicated, but okay, I will just try it.

It’s a normal learn process. And for me, it’s better you have a learning process and you learn something new. One, always… I came back from a conference in Austria, and I give my situation and say, “Okay, sharing will be different in a few weeks.” Also, for you, if you share with another person, it may be changed. Microsoft has completely new stuff about sharing.

The old thing is, you share with a person, but you see, haven’t I shared it with him? Because you have to look for that; it’s complicated. They started in 2024, in January, and now, after two years and six months, it’s ready. It will come, they will roll it out, you will see that, they roll it out. The sharing procedures, you see, with which person do you have shared the documentation, the folder or a file, and it’s new, that will come starting in August, and then it takes up to three months. I don’t know, and I cannot help you if you see that it can be gone from August, but it can be also in September or October. It takes three months for all the tenants around the globe. This is a new thing, and it makes it a little bit easier to share this stuff and control it.

Nehemia: Lynell, any final words?

Lynell: I just think…

Nehemia: …and what was the VP at Microsoft? I called him Max Glover, but it’s not, it’s…

Lynell: Andy, it’s…

Nehemia: Andy Glover.

Lynell: Andy Glover.

Nehemia: I want to give credit to him, because really, he’s saved years of work and really priceless cultural heritage. Like, even if you don’t care about the Bible, these are cultural heritage artifacts, that priceless data was collected and processed, and this has now been restored, and we have everything back. And really, it was… I’m going to speak now for scholars, because academics tend to be very sensitive people. Many of them are on the autism spectrum, like me. And a blow like this is something that not everyone would be able to recover from.

So, guys, back up your data. If you don’t have it locally, you do not have it. I was speaking to one scholar, and he said, “Well, my university has it there, you know. You have a small little NGO or nonprofit, you know, my big university is never going to have that problem.” So, if the British Library is hacked, why do you think your university has better security than the British Library?

Hans: No.

Nehemia: So, if you don’t have it locally, you don’t actually have it.

Hans: Yeah.

Nehemia: At least, like you said, quarterly. Right? And it’s not practical to do it every day and every week.

Hans: It depends. It depends what you are doing. Sometimes it’s more, but the old things you have started and do not work with them, that can be due quarterly. You have to decide a really interesting stuff on your work, what is done and not will be worked again, and things are working in process. So, that’s a different thing.

Nehemia: Yeah, for sure.

Hans: But yeah, it’s in the cloud, it’s everywhere. You have made all things now, right. And therefore, I have to say…

Nehemia: It should be in the cloud too, because what if there’s a fire in your house, God forbid, right? Then you need to have a backup somewhere. Lynell, you want to say some final words?

Lynell: Yeah, I think we need to let people know, look, this is the way that any Windows machine… this is the way that Microsoft, you know, if you’re using Microsoft 365 products… if you’re using Gmail, it’s a different thing, if you’re using Outlook, it’s a different thing, if you’re using OneDrive, which is an excellent one… it’s an excellent product, guys. Here’s what I want to say. I don’t want us to go off another end, because we did talk about Storage Sense, which is built in. And yes, you can turn it off. But if you decide to do something like that, which we actually did in our company, it creates a whole plethora of things that you now have to think about.

Hans: Yep.

Lynell: Now you have to think about your drive and organizing your drive properly. You may have to defrag. I’m not even into it that deep. There are things that we used to do to our drives that we didn’t have to do after Storage Sense came in, and they began to build on that. So, if you decide to do that, please be techie enough to not mess up your computer, because what Microsoft did in creating that was allow you to not mess up your drive. And just like Hans said; he has a 256 gig hard drive. I have a four terabyte. I’m not going to run out of storage in the next few months, but we use a lot of storage.

Hans: Yeah.

Lynell: If you are just a normal person, and you’re not even using it for business, there is very little to worry about. But you should be aware of the fact that, if you use your Downloads folder, the Downloads folder that you use on it…

Nehemia: Or Documents. Meaning, the default is that OneDrive tries to take over Downloads, Documents, and I think Photos and Desktop.

Lynell: Pictures.

Hans: And Desktop. Desktop is critical for me, because I have five systems here in the house. So, I take OneDrive. Think about it; I write on this position now. That’s my little office. In the morning, I go, I have… right on the desk, do the tea. I start with the tea, and take this, and then I have the data over there. In the evening I will look for the soccer game, so I take it in the living room, and my data are there. So, then I use this stuff around my house. I do not have to know about that, it’s always the same.

But if you have only one machine, you have to look for the rules. Go to learn.microsoft.com slash OneDrive and look for that, or SharePoint, because it’s inside from OneDrive. But you can look for that. There are the rules written down. It’s a little bit of techie, but sometimes you can feel and learn the symbols what you have in your explorer. No files, only the cloud, it’s not there. And if you have only one machine, think about what you have done, what’s happened. It’s a green icon, it’s local, and if you go on a journey, you have no internet, you have to do it, although, make it always available. Then it’s on your machine and will not change through rule policy or something else.

Nehemia: But if you create a new file, by default, it’s not going to be always on the machine. You need to know that, unless you do the whole folder like I did, which I can do because I have a four-terabyte hard drive. And I wanted to get an 8 terabyte, but you can’t put one in the laptop because it’ll overheat. Yeah, go ahead.

Lynell: I just want to say that this was a… you know how they talk about a comedy of errors? This was a comedy of errors, and many different things had to happen in order for us to lose the data we did to start with, because we did have backups. We just didn’t have a backup of this collaborative data. And we didn’t know what we had lost until we got it back. I’m just going to be real honest

Nehemia: That was one of the problems. We weren’t exactly sure what the scope of it was.

Hans: Yep.

Nehemia: So, Lynell, can you say some final words and we’ll wrap it up?

Hans: It was nice to see something, and we can talk about one-and-a-half hour. It’s absolutely interesting. And sometimes for us, as a technical guy, I have to learn, and sometimes, although, my wife, the MFA in a hospital (no, it’s a small hospital for kids) but therefore, another thing what we have to talk about, all these acronyms and what they mean behind the stuff, because that’s not the normal thing. I know sometimes people have to know about that, and with this new company, I have all the same thing. I have to think, that’s normal people, that’s not IT… you have to reduce it of a minimum. We have to make copies; we have the same thing what we should do. And therefore, it’s very interesting to work in this stuff, and I like it. I like to see that. And okay, also send me a link if you have the stuff about that, and thank you so much for this one-and-a-half hour.

Nehemia: Yeah, thank you Hans. Lynell, any final words?

Lynell: I just want people out there that usually listen to your podcast to know that this is really not something to be afraid of, it’s not something to fear. It’s just, knowledge makes it more powerful, and Nehemia wanted to share this so that you guys would understand what had happened. We will share a personal story about this at a different date. We’ll go through a lot more of the details that happened. But I just want to thank you guys for praying. I know a lot of you out there were praying for us about the data. So many of you, when you found out that the data hadn’t been restored, literally met it with tears. That statement that it was restored, when I spoke to you or when I saw you online… you know, people were crying.

We are so grateful for those prayers, because I can tell you there are a lot of nonprofits out there that were not as fortunate, that did not have the same outcome. But God is in control of all that, and so, I’m very, very grateful to God for putting us and giving us favor with the right people. I’m so grateful to Andy.

Nehemia: Andy Glover.

Lynell: And he was so kind to me at a time that… you know, that’s a very vulnerable time when you lose data. He’s done this many years. He’s been the lead developer over all the developers for OneDrive and for SharePoint for many years before they made him a VP. And so, I just want to say, your team was very, very kind, they were nice. I’m glad we got to level three and you were able to get it back to us. Thank you.

Nehemia: Thank you, Hans.

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OTHER LINKS
https://learn.microsoft.com/onedrive/

The post Hebrew Voices #253 – Seven Years of Work – Gone! appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this opening episode of Torah in Context - Ancient Light for a Modern Heart, Nehemia and Lynell kick off a brand-new series working through all 54 weekly Torah portions. Uncover the timeless depth of the Torah and its enduring relevance to the modern heart and soul, while taking a fascinating detour into how truth and revelation can work for someone with zero access to Scripture.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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VERSES MENTIONED
Genesis 1:1-6:8
Acts 15:21; 21:25
Nehemia 8:8
Genesis 9:4
Isaiah 13:10
Leviticus 19:19; Deuteronomy 22:11
Deuteronomy 26:5
Deuteronomy 31:9-13
Deuteronomy 30:11-14
Judges 13:18
Genesis 18:22-33
Deuteronomy 17:8-13
Numbers 15:32-36
Numbers 9:6-14
Leviticus 24:10-16
Numbers 27:1-11; 36
Numbers 27:12-23
Psalm 119:18
Ezra 2:63; Nehemiah 7:65
Jerusalem Talmud Megillah 2:2; Shevi'it 9:1
Philippians 2:12

RELATED EPISODES
Torah Pearls and Prophet Pearls

The post Torah in Context – Ancient Light for a Modern Heart – Episode 0 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Discover the biblical meaning of Yom Kippur in this short episode of our new series, Hebrew Fundamentals. Bringing together the best of Nehemia’s teachings in one accessible introduction, it’s the perfect opportunity to explore - or revisit - his material on this important appointed time.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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The post Hebrew Fundamentals – Yom Kippur appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Is Yom Teruah the Jewish New Year? In this edited recording of their live Yom Teruah 2026 webinar, Nehemia Gordon and Lynell go back to the Torah on the first day of the seventh month — why the Hebrew word for "month" means "new moon," how new moon witnesses were examined (and how sincere people still get it wrong), the Talmudic clash between Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua over who sets the calendar, the three "otam" passages in Leviticus 23 the rabbis read as "atem", you, and why Numbers 10 describes silver trumpets rather than a shofar, plus a candid Q&A on calendar disagreements and keeping the feasts in exile.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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VERSES MENTIONED
• Exodus 12 (12:16) — Passover, first holy convocation
• Exodus 16:1 — dating by the new moon
• Exodus 20 — the Ten Commandments
• Leviticus 23 (23:2, 23:4, 23:24, 23:37) — appointed times; "otam" / "atem"
• Numbers 10:1–7 (10:2, 10:7) — silver trumpets, tekiah vs. teruah
• Numbers 29:1 — day of blowing, first day of the seventh month
• Deuteronomy 6:4–7 — the Shema; "v'shinantam," teaching by repetition
• Joshua 6:5 — the shofar blast at Jericho
• 1 Samuel 20 — the new moon feast with Saul and David
• Psalm 98:4 — make a joyful noise
• Psalm 150 — praise with the shofar and trumpet
• Ezekiel 40–41 — the temple vision

The post The Truth About Yom Teruah | 2026 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Discover the biblical meaning of Yom Teruah in this short episode of our new series, Hebrew Fundamentals. Bringing together the best of Nehemia’s teachings in one accessible introduction, it’s the perfect opportunity to explore - or revisit - his material on this important appointed time.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
Apple Podcasts | 
Amazon Music
 | TuneIn
Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser
 | Pandora

The post Hebrew Fundamentals – Yom Teruah appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.