Windows 7 Windows 7 - dissapearing folders in USER folder

joel4283

New Member
Before I came to post here, I considered every possible alternative to "it just dissapeared". I'm by no means a novice user, and also by no means a complete expert. I've been in user support for over 12+ years so I can safely assume I know what I'm talking about...and I hope you can too.

Here's the situation..let's cut right to the chase.

The contents of my wife's user foler (Katy) just dissapeared overnight.

I just performed a clean install of Windows 7 (Version 6.1 Build 7600) on Friday. By Saturday, I had completed all updates and began to restore data from my backup drive. The data restored was pretty much pictures and documents from our My documents folder. All restores were completed and both our profiles checked out just fine. I finished this around 3:30pm Saturday.

I pretty much stayed away from the computer the rest of Sat night and all day Sunday with the exception of some light maintenance. I had no errors or anything to make me think something was wrong. I didn't perform any disk defrags, or cleanups...nor did I delete any data whatsoever.

This morning i go into setup my backups and boom, my wife's user folder is empty. There's no "my pictures", "my documents", "my videos"....nothing. Only folders in there are Contacts, Desktop and a hidden App Data folder. I went ahead and logged into her profile and it's still not there. I click on the links for document and music on her start menu and they take me to public documents and public music.

I log back in as Admin and check the structure of the Katy folder again. Now, it's showing the "my docs", "my music"...blah blah...but all empty.

Anyone seen this? Ideas???

What I've tried...

Restore previous version - Nogo. last restore point is @ 3:53pm on Saturday. All contents of her user folder of the available restores are blank
Used various undelete utilities - Nogo. they find nothing deleted that would of been in her folder
Checked Windows logs - Checked the time frame that things would of "dissapreared" no programs ran, no errors.


WTF?!?!?!?
 
I am theorising but what program did you use for the restore operation? Was it the standard Windows restore?
I think that possibly what has happened is that the restore has attempted to place these files into the Windows 7 Documents and settings folder. This exists, but it is a system folder (known as a junction) for backward compatibility only. By default it is not accessible.
I think your best wau to transfer the files, however odious, is by copy and paste. You can gain access to the Documents and settings folder by altering the security, but it is a dangerous thing to do in Window 7 and can have bad side effects
 
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