My Files Are Gone

I'm not sure how this happened, but all of my files have been delted. My user account reset itself for some reason. There's the default pictures I had long since deleted in the My Pictures folder, replacing my artwork and wallpapers, etc. My desktop has been wiped clean, all except for Paint.Net and Recyle Bin.

My Documents has been totally reset, but my family's other accounts are fine and intact. Things like my Paper Mario game and drawings are okay, as this thing didn't touch my C: drive, appearently (aside from my user account).

Any ideas why this happened? Or just like, discuss times when ugly stuff has happened to your computer.

Has anyone accessed your account recently?

i tried reinstalling windows on my old computer and it didn't work, so i had to use my dad's computer for 2 years (sucked)

i dunno why i totally forgot about trying to install linux then but oh well

No one claims to have done anything. The only thing I can think of would be that my sister created 3 other user accounts (which have since been deleted as they're completely unnecessary). I don't know if that has the potential to mess anything up, though.

This post has been edited by Pucifur on Mar 26 2008, 12:55 PM

I had once the same thing last month before I wiped Losedow$.

Were you using the Administrator ("root") account?

Have you backed your computer recently.? Or have a restore point set?

Restore points affect only system files.

magic thing called a virus????????????????????

Don't forget Programs, registry files, and updates.

Trojan horse? Worm? Virus?

potentially. windows' multi-user support has never been very good and I wouldn't be surprised if it glitched up at that point ???

I disagree. I've never seen or heard of such a possible scenario. That would be one BIG glitch.

My other computer overheated once. It's broken now.

It can happen if your user profile becomes corrupt, in which case Windows MAY create a new profile for you. Look in your Documents and Settings folder for any traces of your old profile. You may find that in addition to the YourName folder, there's now a YourName.000, which is your new profile.

This kind of thing happens a lot in Dynamic Local User environments, but usually it's Windows failing to properly delete the old profile before creating the new one. I'd actually be pretty surprised to see this crop up from regular desktop use.

I've also seen this happen with profiles loaded from SAMBA shares.

i've also had power outages kill files that were in the process of being saved or moved

ie 'kill' as in you can't even open them in a hex editor or even delete them

blah blah "buy a UPS dumbass"

How actually did it happen?

And there's nothing in C:\documents and settings\ ?

Oh gawd, this is the worst case scenario.

Got a backup? I recommend that we have backup discs every time we reinstall or upgrade our software on our PCs....

I have like 12 DVDs full of my data.

Virus, perhaps?

Actually this sounds the closest to what happened. My files are in tact inside the Documetns and Settings folder, but when I go directly to My Pictures, Music, etc., all of the files are absent. This happened to my sister's account just today, so I don't know if this is what you're talking about.

I also ran several virus scans, none of which brought up anything.

My Documents, My Pictures, My Videos, etc are very special shortcut folders. They aren't real folders, nor are they even conventional shortcuts. They're shell folders, and the paths they point to is defined in the Windows registry for each user in the system. If you're curious, you can see them by running "regedit" and navigating through the folder tree to HKEY_CURRENT_USER->Software->Microsoft->Windows->Current Version->Explorer->Shell Folders.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER refers to the registry-portion of the user profile of whoever is actively logged in. It would indeed be interesting to see where those folders actually map, and if you go up one level, you can see an entry for "login name" as well.

Whatever the root cause, at least it's only an inconvenience and you haven't actually lost anything. But you might want to take this as a hint and back up the things you care about, in case the root cause is something more severe.