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Hi. I would appreciate if anyone can give ideas. A couple of our users have reported that their files from home folders are missing. When we came to check, their folders are in place but there are no files inside. What could be the issue?

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You didn’t really give us much to go on here.

What OS is this?

Did the User delete the files?

Do you have backups?

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If your users remember any of the file names then you could do a search for them and that may reveal if they exist.

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Hi,

File are stored in a file server windows server 2012 R2 and we do have backups. The user was pretty sure that there are files in the folder and I’ve browse through all of them and none of the folders have files. We compared it with the backup and it files are there. So far, only 2 users have reported.

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If you have vss on you can right click the folder and check the previous versions to see if there were file in the folders.

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hmm, what could be the issue? If you have auditing enabled it can be answered if you read logs.

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I’ll go out on a limb here and straight-up say your users deleted the files (deliberately or inadvertently) but aren’t fessing up to the crime

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In my experience this usually means that the user deleted a file or moved it and don’t remember doing so or won’t fess up to it. I’d say you’re path of least resistance, if you can do so, is restore the file from backup.

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My experience in this situation has been an inadvertent drag and drop. Do a search for the file names, and dollars to donuts, you’ll find them in another folder.

If they don’t turn up, at least it sounds like you’re able to restore from a recent back up.

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Hmmm, weird. If you have a number of users and all their home folders are empty, it wouldn’t really make sense that every user deleted all their files. Normally a user is the only one with permissions to their own folder, so I wouldn’t think another user could have deleted all the files, unless someone with admin rights maybe? Is your security good on the server? Hopefully no public facing RDP access?

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Have seen where the backup program “moves” the files instead of copying.

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Sometimes people drag a folder by mistake… and move the contents… maybe that happened.

Also if someone was messing around with Group Policy, the person could have changed the location of their “my Documents” storage… and pointed it to another place. Look on the network for their files and try to do searches to find unique file names that could point you in the right direction.

Do you have backups??

Are their MY DOCS under the C: drive or on the server drive?? Maybe they are logged into the PC as a different user profile and they really aren’t seeing their own files? Check under C:\USERS folder and see what usernames are there… see if there are multiple profiles… and check them all

Ever PC most likely have SHADOW COPY turned on… which is a automatic backup of all folders made twice a day on the PC. Just RIGHT CLICK on the folder MY DOCS and see “PREVIOUS VERSIONS” and see if you can restore the data…

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The majority of missing files we experience are down to inadvertent drag and drops. It’s usually in the next folder along.

@danmuzrall

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Are you using Microsoft OneDrive’s AutoSave? I’ve seen a bug with a few users…when turning on Auto-Save all the Documents gets moved to a new Documents folder that gets nested in the OneDrive folder.

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I am with you on this.

@williamnb

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Considering there were quite few replies that were similar I don’t think you went out on a limb. Except for the limb of “users don’t want to hear this but it’s their fault”

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Check the recycle bin and see if they are there.

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18

Check for a drag an drop error, also check Shadow Copy. Are you using Oflline Files? You could be having a sync issue.

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Turn on file auditing. That way if this keeps happening, you will have proof instead of having to guess.

Finding file access events in the event log can be a bit of a pain. Fortunately there are some good 3rd party tools that are much easier to read.

There are some paid 3rd party utilities that can collect the file auditing events and report them in an easy to read format. Netwrix and ManageEngine File Server audit come to mind.

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This is obscure, but NextCloud will remove your files if you mark a folder for sync then uncheck a subfolder within it. But if you are talking about files, there is always the possibility of malware, but you would expect more files would be missing. An inadvertent drag and drop is unlikely because the problem is that ALL individual files are gone (if I read the post correctly) which could only happen if the user both inadvertently selected all items in the folder THEN went on to inadvertently drag them somewhere else. Yeah. Uh huh. When I was a kid I inadvertently stole cookies from the cookie jar.