Can I recover Onedrive files from an old hard drive?

I need to recover some files from an old hard drive. They are in the Onedrive folder and seem to be offline (there’s a cross icon on them and show the O attribute when I do “attrib filename” with any of them.

These are files I deleted from my cloud onedrive long ago, so I have no way to recover them from any cloud Onedrive previous backup (I checked this already, they aren’t present even on the Onedrive older backups in the cloud).

Judging by the size of the files (images, docx and text files): they’re not “empty”, so I guess they have all the contents and they should be recoverable.

I tried copying them over to my current Onedrive folder with Robocopy, but they are also offline in destination and can’t be opened.

I cannot copy them with copy-paste as I get a pop-up "cloud provider not found..." or similar.

Is there any way to recover these files? I’m using the same Onedrive account and credentials that I used when I was using the old drive.

I copied them over with this command: ROBOCOPY F:\USERS\RichardK\Onedrive C:\Users\RichardK\Onedrive /MIR /B

Any help much appreciated

There is the "OneDrive On Demand" feature which, if enabled, could cause files to only live online and not exist locally. I believe it's controlled by this in the OneDrive settings.

If this is checked, or was checked while OneDrive was being used, then OneDrive might not keep/have kept a local copy. (What is in it's place is an NTFS reparse point).

Judging by the size of the files (images, docx and text files): they’re not “empty”, so I guess they have all the contents and they should be recoverable.

In this case, you're probably correct. All you need to do is copy them over.