Windows 8 appears to have erased all my files

Hello, good day! I'm very dissatisfied with the product, since it apparently has erased all the data from my previous year of work. There are multiple factors, but pretty much it happened after the system installed the latest update last Friday the 13th. Next time I turned on the computer, there was a different color background where my photo and login address are. I logged in and to my surprise everything looked like the first time I turned on the computer back in June last year with several software uninstalled and my files apparently gone. After searching through the C:// Drive, I found them on the user account, and decided to move to their original place in order to access to them easier.

Everything was working fine, I can even say I started to like the reboot, but then, all of a sudden, the computer crashed, and after I turn it on again, the background color was back to the same color as before the Friday crash. I logged in, the desktop looked like I left it before Friday, and the files I had moved were gone, permanently, I presume.

I REALLY WISH SOMEONE MIGHT BE ABLE TO HELP ME! I WOULD REALLY LIKE TO RESCUE THOSE FILES, but in case it's not possible, I would just like to report to you this terrible, terrible glitch, which might in the future affect other users. At the same time, I need help understanding what the hell happened, in order to prevent it from happening again.


Thank You!

It sounds like you may have been signed on as a temporary profile - this happens if your profile is corrupted but you normally get a message when you sign on saying it has happened. If you move things to the desktop while signed on using a temporary profile you lose them after you sign off.

Is that where you moved things (the desktop) when you say "I found them on the user account, and decided to move to their original place in order to access to them easier."?

Have you tried searching for any of your lost documents?

You could also check if you have a folder C:\Users\Temp on your system. Recover Data from temp profile - Spiceworks

That seems to be exactly what happened, it's just I can't seem to remember been alerted that the change was temporary... That's why I moved the files to the documents carpet in the new account, assuming it was a permanent change. It's just there were quite some files that I find it hard to believe they got deleted so fast.

I'll try the software, guess I have nothing to lose, since searching doesn't turn up much. One of the carpets I searched appears but just as a shortcut :3

I'll log my results down, thanks!

The Pandora software is working to some extend. I'll try to save as much as I can. Thank you!

As soon as you get your data back, consider in the long run, having a separate OS & programs partition, and a separate data partition; yes, it's lots of planning and work up front, however, once data resides on a separate partition, it will no longer be at the mercy of any login of any acct.. Having docs & files on the desktop is not a good idea, according to some images backup/restore gurus.

This is one reason I don't store any of my data on the system partition. It is always on a data partition, or stored on a cloud service folder (like Box or OneDrive), which also resides on the data partition. I prefer to keep anything like that isolated from the OS.

Diegoo21 said:

The Pandora software is working to some extend. I'll try to save as much as I can. Thank you!

Click to expand...

Good news...

RolandJS said:

As soon as you get your data back, consider in the long run, having a separate OS & programs partition, and a separate data partition; yes, it's lots of planning and work up front, however, once data resides on a separate partition, it will no longer be at the mercy of any login of any acct..

Click to expand...

That wouldn't help in this case as the docs were moved to the desktop and desktop is deleted when signing off... If they hadn't been moved they wouldn't have been deleted.

RolandJS said:

Having docs & files on the desktop is not a good idea

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So it would seem.

Backups are always a good idea also (easy to say that after the fact of course)