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Why would you need to if they're synced to the cloud, just download them again

I think the question he is asking is why download something sitting on the local disk.

Two answers

General answer: Because it's needless complexity (relying on a company's service rather than... reading from a local disk) that masks what is actually happening behind the scenes. It will always be less reliable.

Answer in that specific situation: They were files in a OneDrive that no longer existed after a tenant migration (they hired a consulting company that seemed to bungle things).

Pretty sure logging into a service you decided to use on another computer is easier than trying to recover files from a computer that won't boot

If you set up files on demand, you have to demand your files, it's in the name.

Hope they never paid the consulting company

If software prevents me from performing a simple action on my files on my machine (unless this is the specific intended function I had for the program) it is, in the simplest sense of the term, malware. It has done me malice. People pay to be harmed, go figure.

So what would be your course of action if you had an SSD failure?

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