# All my file gone!



## sisterpine (May 9, 2004)

I do not know what happened. I was in my journal writing this afternoon and suddenly all of my personal files are GONE. My taxes, my business records, my feed records, letter and check copies all gone. I have no idea what happened. I ran a restore and nothing changed. I am so screwed.


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## painterswife (Jun 7, 2004)

Restore only fixes programs.. Have you looked in your trash file? Do you back uo your files?


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## sisterpine (May 9, 2004)

yes the trash file is empty, i did nothing that would have caused this massive issue


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## painterswife (Jun 7, 2004)

sisterpine said:


> yes the trash file is empty, i did nothing that would have caused this massive issue


Search one of the file names. You might have moved a folder.


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## Shine (Feb 19, 2011)

If you use Microsoft Word, Open your "Computer" - Click on "Start" -> "Computer" then in the window that opens, click on the "C:" drive, in the upper right hand corner underneath the Red "X", you will see an entry field that should have the word "Search" in it.

In that search window type *.doc* and hit enter. This will search your whole hard drive for any Word document. If you have a lot of those this will show you where they are. If you do find them then all that you have to do is to move them back to where you want them to be.

This is ONLY if you had saved them to your primary system drive, if you were saving them to another drive then start the above instructions over but click on the drive where you think that they were stored.

If you do not use Microsoft Word then tell us what word processing application or other application that you use to do your documents and we can modify the instructions above.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

sisterpine said:


> I do not know what happened. I was in my journal writing this afternoon and suddenly all of my personal files are GONE. My taxes, my business records, my feed records, letter and check copies all gone. I have no idea what happened. I ran a restore and nothing changed. I am so screwed.


They're probably still there, but you may be logged-in as a different user from when the files were created. The thing is that an unprivileged user (someone who's not the administrator) can't see another unprivileged user's files. Log out and log back in as the proper user. You can also login as administrator, since the administrator can see all files in the system.


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## sisterpine (May 9, 2004)

Shine, i tried that just now and there is nothing there of my files. now i am checking the user deal.


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## sisterpine (May 9, 2004)

darn it says the only account on this devise is the one I am signed in under. I hate my life today!


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## Belfrybat (Feb 21, 2003)

What operating system are you using?


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## Shine (Feb 19, 2011)

Describe a little bit more about how you got there... anything unusual happen?


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## AngieM2 (May 10, 2002)

Would starting in a date earlier than the files missing bring them back?


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

AngieM2 said:


> Would starting in a date earlier than the files missing bring them back?


A restore point can take the operating system & installed applications to a previous state. But applying a restore point should have no affect on user files. It won't delete them, and it won't restore them.


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## ||Downhome|| (Jan 12, 2009)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.piriform.com/docs/recuva/advanced-usage/running-recuva-from-a-usb-drive


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## Belfrybat (Feb 21, 2003)

If I were in this situation, I'd take the computer to a repair place and have them recover the files. The more you mess around with the computer the less chance you have of recovering them.


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## sisterpine (May 9, 2004)

that is my plan, take it to puter shop in town. I am windows 7 pro morphed to 10 though no fault of my own. Now it looks more like windows 7 again. Hopefully the town geek can do something with it.


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## Shine (Feb 19, 2011)

There have been persons who have taken Microsoft to court regarding the manner in which they have been upgraded and have suffered from that upgrade, and they have gotten a decision in their favor - keep that in mind...

27 years in the business - have witnessed many, many problems with upgrading one OS to another, will never recommend an upgrade - only a full blown "clean load" on a formatted drive as being the most efficient.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

Shine said:


> There have been persons who have taken Microsoft to court regarding the manner in which they have been upgraded and have suffered from that upgrade, and they have gotten a decision in their favor - keep that in mind...
> 
> 27 years in the business - have witnessed many, many problems with upgrading one OS to another, will never recommend an upgrade - only a full blown "clean load" on a formatted drive as being the most efficient.


When it comes to user files, there really is no excuse for not keeping them in a folder that's shared with a cloud drive. You get 15GB on a free Google Drive account. That should be enough user file space for even advanced computer users. If you do that, even if you lost your entire hard drive all your user files are still safe at Google Drive.

I've modified the default save folder in MS Word, so new Word files are saved at Google Drive by default. I've done the same for other applications. I've been recommend storing user files on a cloud drive in this forum for years, but I doubt anyone listens. I'm having less and less sympathy for people who trust critically important files to a hard drive. *Please people, get a free Google Drive account and keep all of your user files there.*

If you have security concerns about some Google tech having too much time on his hands and browsing your files, you can encrypt stored files with axcrypt. It's free.

http://www.axcrypt.net/download/

But you should only need to encrypt your most sensitive files, like text files containing passwords and such.


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## mnn2501 (Apr 2, 2008)

Nevada said:


> When it comes to user files, there really is no excuse for not keeping them in a folder that's shared with a cloud drive.


As long as you ignore the security factor. True, most home users don't have anything that needs to be secure, but there is a reason banks don't adopt cloud technology.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

mnn2501 said:


> As long as you ignore the security factor. True, most home users don't have anything that needs to be secure, but there is a reason banks don't adopt cloud technology.


I don't ignore security, I deal with it. That's why I included the link to AxCrypt. Sensitive information can be encrypted with AxCrypt. Of course people with advanced versions of Windows can use BitLocker instead, but I only encrypt a few of my files so I find AxCrypt to be easier for me.


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## Heritagefarm (Feb 21, 2010)

This is why I back up my files to an external hard drive, always. They only cost about 50 dollars and can really save you in an instance like this. Cloud drives also work great, but it's more expensive and someone might hack your data.


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## arabian knight (Dec 19, 2005)

Heritagefarm said:


> This is why I back up my files to an external hard drive, always. They only cost about 50 dollars and can really save you in an instance like this. Cloud drives also work great, but it's more expensive and someone might hack your data.


Nope I don't do The Cloud either. Even with my Mac and the iCloud feature they offer. Nope~! I use a external hard drive that backs up everything.. I mean those things ARE NEAT~! And the one I bought was already Mac Formatted too. hat is Cool~! And at the same time I bought mine a few years ago I also had two friends that also bought these external drives. man they are great. 
Besides will all these updated OS systems that Apply has been doing THEY even recommend BACKING UP before doing such updates. And now the past few years you can only update the OS via the Internet.~! And I read Microsoft also started doing this, no more buying a disc and updating the system.
And I will have a pretty big update coming in a few months as Apple will even rename OS X and it will be called Mac OS . Hmmm Wonder what version the new one be this one is now OPS X El Capitan. Been like 6 or 7 versions since I bought this iMac 8 years ago. LOL. But the bugger is just as fast as it was since I bought it 8 years ago. YEAH. The only thing I have done so far to this iMac, was up the RAM from the 2 gig it came with, to the Max at 8 gig. LOL


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

Heritagefarm said:


> This is why I back up my files to an external hard drive, always. They only cost about 50 dollars and can really save you in an instance like this. Cloud drives also work great, but it's more expensive and someone might hack your data.


As I said, I use a free drive service from Google. Google Drive gives me 15GB cloud storage for free. I only store user files, so it's plenty of space.


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## arabian knight (Dec 19, 2005)

Well at 60 bucks I have 320 External Hard Drive Back up Space. Well and that is what the size is of my iMac also. LOL I don't store hardly anything so I have 3/4 of that still available. LOL


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

arabian knight said:


> Well at 60 bucks I have 320 External Hard Drive Back up Space. Well and that is what the size is of my iMac also. LOL I don't store hardly anything so I have 3/4 of that still available. LOL


I used to use an external hard drive, but using a cloud drive is automatic. When I create a new Word document it's automatically backed up.


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## Heritagefarm (Feb 21, 2010)

Nevada said:


> As I said, I use a free drive service from Google. Google Drive gives me 15GB cloud storage for free. I only store user files, so it's plenty of space.


I use google drive and iCloud for most of my documents. But I don't have enough bandwidth to constantly back up all the documents and pictures.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

Heritagefarm said:


> I use google drive and iCloud for most of my documents. But I don't have enough bandwidth to constantly back up all the documents and pictures.


That's usually not a problem. Once you have your user files uploaded, from then on it's just one file at a time when they are created or edited. I have pretty good DSL so I don't even notice.


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## arabian knight (Dec 19, 2005)

Nevada said:


> I used to use an external hard drive,* but using a cloud drive is automatic*.


Well so does my external drive, it backs up every hour, could be set as soon as you add something new, but I have it set to backup every hour.
And like you said, once everything is set up it only takes a minute or so and the backup is done. You never notice it at all when it does the backup.
Maybe a few minutes, but it is a short period of time, so any bandwidth restrictions sure would not be ate up very much, if at all.


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## painterswife (Jun 7, 2004)

arabian knight said:


> Well so does my external drive, it backs up every hour, could be set as soon as you add something new, but I have it set to backup every hour.
> And like you said, once everything is set up it only takes a minute or so and the backup is done. You never notice it at all when it does the backup.
> Maybe a few minutes, but it is a short period of time, so any bandwidth restrictions sure would not be ate up very much, if at all.


We get you love your backup drive. Tell us how great it is when somone steals it and your computer or youf hoyse burns down. I have a server to backup to as well as a few drives. I still backup important files again to a cloud drive. Easy peace of mind for people who depend on those files for their financial health.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

painterswife said:


> We get you love your backup drive. Tell us how great it is when somone steals it and your computer or youf hoyse burns down. I have a server to backup to as well as a few drives. I still backup important files again to a cloud drive. Easy peace of mind for people who depend on those files for their financial health.


Yes, off-premise backup has always been the gold standard in data security. Businesses used to pay a lot for off-premise backup, but it was worth it to them. Imagine a law office being gutted by fire some night. They couldn't afford the data loss.

It used to be that only the best capitalized businesses could afford off-premise backup, but today most of us have high speed Internet and shared backup folders like Google Drive & Dropbox are free. It's there and it's free. Everyone should be doing it. As I said, I'm having less and less sympathy for data loss all the time.


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