Onedrive Syncing 250GB of Data All Over Again

[Spicierboar]

Kindly consider the following

1. OneDrive on my PC points to a folder on D:\ that is an external hard drive.
2. 2 Days ago, my windows 10 crashed (blue screen) and the OS as well as all other applications had to be reinstalled.
3. I also reinstalled OneDrive pointing it to the OneDrive folder on the external HDD.
4. Before the system crashed, OneDrive contents were in sync and completely updated
5. After the reinstallation of OneDrive, OneDrive removed all data from D:\, reinitialising the folder and is currently downloading all the contents again from the cloud OneDrive.

Thankfully, Microsoft windows does not have to be reinstalled every day. It is still very concerning that any new reinstallation of OneDrive will mean OneDrive overwriting the existing contents and downloading the same files from the cloud all over again.

Is there a way to prevent? Shouldn't OneDrive be making a date time stamp comparison and simply syncing the differences?

Is there any risk of losing the files stored in cloud OneDrive?

Thank you.