My Documents contents simply vanished.

[drgeoz]

This has never happened to me, and i'm screwed.
I went to go retrieve a file from the My Documents folder, and after double clicking the folder...it came up empty!!

I've got college essays, documents, bills, etc. evertying in that folder and my last backup was about 6 weeks ago.

Why is my documents folder empty, and more importantly, how do i get my information back - it couldn't simply vanish, could it?


Thanks,

George.



Oh, in case you're curious - It's a Dell 8200 on XP Home SP2. Never had this problem in my life.

 

[DJ-CHRIS1]

I believe their's a virus that goes around deleting your documents.

 

[Raffaz]

Have you deleted any user accounts? You may be to recover them with a data recovery program like getdataback

 

[drgeoz]

Nope, didn't delete any accounts or anything like that.
My brother was on the computer just surfing the web, and he went into documents to find something, and the Documents folder was empty. We had all the pics, music, etc. in there.

It had been working fine this morning and up to now, and all of a sudden it's all gone. Weird?

 

[Raffaz]

have you scanned for viruses/spyware etc. are they not in ya recycle bin? if not run some data recovery program

 

[Raffaz]

oh and go into explorer and check show hidden files and folders, incase some virus has changed the attributes to hidden (probably not but its worth a try)

 

[drgeoz]

Ran the spyware and virus stuff - found the usual spyware stuff.
Checked through explorer, couldn't find anything there either.

What kind of data recovery would you recommend for something like this?

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

[Raffaz]

u check recycle bin? best program i have used is getdataback, you have to buy it tho. There are plenty of free recovery tools out there but the ones i have tried in the past have been crap. Getdataback was far better than anything i tried before

 

[joelbeveridge]

Try a simple windows + S. This will bring up a search box, now if you remember one of the file names that have gone missing, scan the total computer for that name. It might of been moved.

 

[Raffaz]

Try a simple windows + S. This will bring up a search box, now if you remember one of the file names that have gone missing, scan the total computer for that name. It might of been moved.

That should be windows+F