Faculty, staff, and students may see many ~$ files in their SharePoint after ITS performed a data migration.
Quick Summary: These are “lock” files and do not contain any information; they can be deleted.
What are ~$ files?
These are temporary lock files created by Office 365 (replaced by Microsoft 365). In the past when a user opened an Office file, their computer created an accompanying file that was named after the original file, but with a “~$” added to the beginning.
If another user tried to open that same file at the same time, their computer would have recognized the lock file and not allowed the second user to open the Office file. This is how the “lock” file received its name.
When the first user closed the Office file, the lock file automatically deleted itself.
Why am I seeing these files now?
These files are usually set to “hidden,” which means they are invisible in File Explorer (Windows) and Finder (macOS). However, the automatic deletion command that should have removed the lock file when you closed the Office file didn’t always work. Therefore, an orphaned file remains. This file is no longer connected to the source file, and it will sit there forever. This usually isn’t an issue due to the extremely small file size of the lock file, and they’re “hidden” which means they are never seen by the user.
However now that data is being migrated to SharePoint, these files are becoming visible. The data migration tool used by ITS moves these lock files as if they were any other file. In the migration, these files lost their “hidden” attribute, so all previously hidden files are now visible to all users.
You may see ~$ files that correlate to files that have since been moved or deleted, leaving only the ~$ remaining causing you to believe the file has been corrupted. This is not the case. Corrupted files will not append “~$” to themselves as a warning.
What do I do about these files?
These lock files are safe to delete.
You cannot extract any information about the original files out of the lock file; nothing will be lost by deleting these files.
When the Office files were migrated into SharePoint, they were migrated into a newer computing environment. These files now support simultaneous, real-time editing. Therefore, no new lock files will be created!