Win10 files gone after restart

[callumstatham]

Hi all,

I’m honestly stuck.

After a reboot all personal files and folder have gone.

I’m presuming this is caused by a corruption on the user profile however I can’t see any additional profiles created for the user on:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

No updates have been installed recently to cause this. I’ve restored to a backup a day earlier but the files are still missing.

I’ve had a look to see if there is a Windows.old but nothing.

The files just cant be gone?

I appreciate that all files should be backed-up but this is one of my staff’s laptops and we do tell them not to keep files they need on their computers as it isn’t backed up.

Let me know if you need any more info!

[mad-spicehead]

Do you know which files/folders are gone? Is there a possibility that the user mistakenly dragged and dropped a folder and placed it elsewhere? This has happened to clients I’ve dealt with in the past.

Check c:\users and see if there is a secondary profile created there for the user. For instance we had multiple folders created for the same ID when we migrated to a new domain controller (or if the user was now logging on to a local profile).

So you might see.
Jsmith
Jsmith.computername
Jsmith.domainname

See if you can remote into this station and look around.

[spiceuser-dco5c]

The only user profiles that you should see listed in that registry key are the Default and Public user profiles.

Have you had a look in the C:\USERS folder to see what sub-folders are actually there?

[culesflatlander]

check for fixes on the latest W10 update several of the last updates can do this from what I recall

[callumstatham]

Thanks all, unfortunately none of the above helped. I ran Recuva and was able to get some of the lost data back but not everything.

Hopefully they start backing up things in the future.

Thanks for your help!

[cameliasacui (mindtab)]

Windows.old folder would only be there if the current version of Windows in an upgrade from a previous version.

I am trying to understand this sentence: “I’ve restored to a backup a day earlier but the files are still missing.” If you restored files from a backup to the users profile folder, are you saying that the next day they went missing again (while checking that the user is logged in into their profile, and not a temp one?).

Have you checked the One Drive folders (Personal or Cloud)? Check the user’s mapped drives ( cmd prompt, do a DIR <*known-or-partial-of-a-filename> /s ), maybe user moved them there.

Btw— a good program for local recovery of files, ‘TogetherShare Data Recovery’ is pretty good at recovering not just by grouping file types, but succeeding in a tree type recovery, with the actual names of the files. Depends on what has been written to the drive since then.