Windows 8 Vanishing backedup files

Bummer. A couple of thoughts.

Is that problematic "My Passport" device the place where the files disappeared from? If so, there may not be much you can do to recover them from there. However, it sounded like you were describing them disappearing from your internal hard drive. That's a different matter. In fact, if the files were ever on your hard drive, you may be able to recover them, even if they just passed through the hard drive on their way to the bad USB drive.

In general, file contents remain on your hard drive until they are written over, either by a hard format, which actually writes a data pattern over whatever was previously there, or new material being stored in the same location. Deletion (and soft formatting), just removes the reference to the data and the space becomes available for re-use. If your files were ever there, they are either still there but "hiding", or the contents are sitting on the hard drive platters waiting to be over-written (or by now, partially over-written). The first thing to do is stop doing anything that writes to the hard drive in order to preserve what might still be there.

Download Swiftsearch from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/ . If you have a good USB drive, save it directly to there. My recollection is that you can use this program without installation, you just run it. It only works on NTFS, but that's what most current internal hard drives are. It looks directly to the file table instead of indexing the drive, so it is not only extremely fast, it will find anything that is known by the system to be there. See if it finds the missing files. If so, we just need to figure out how to make them visible to you. If not, on to step 2.

Step 2 is to recover what can be recovered from what used to be there. Download Revuca from here: Link Removed . Again, download to an external hard disk or good thumb drive. Don't try to save it to a CD or DVD because that process writes it to the hard disk first. When you run this program, do all recovery to an external drive, as well, so the recovered data doesn't over-write other lost contents. This can also be run in "portable" mode, which doesn't require any installation.

The processes of moving data around don't delete files in a way that allows simple un-deletion. Still, since we don't know for sure what happened to the files, try a simple undelete first. However, you will likely need what they call a "deep" scan, which scavenges anything that is not a hard format pattern or accounted for as a known file. If this produces results, it is often overwhelming--thousands of poorly identified files. If that's the result, get back to the forum and I can offer some hints for sifting through it.