My friend turned on her PC today and noticed that all her files seem to be missing. However, they aren't actually gone—they're still on her drives. It appears she's logged into a different user profile or something like that. It's as if the PC reset, but the files themselves are still there. Can anyone help figure out what's going on?
4 Answers
It sounds like her user profile might be corrupted, and she’s logged into a temporary profile. This often happens, so it’s worth checking for any folders labeled "TEMP" in the users folder to confirm. Unfortunately, fixing a corrupt profile can be tricky, but the easiest solution is to create a new profile and transfer her data over to it. It’s also a good idea to run some diagnostics on the drive to rule out hardware issues.
If she has backups or any files on external drives, she could use software like Disk Drill to recover them. It's always good to have recovery tools ready just in case.
Just a quick tip: when dealing with profile issues, **don't** try to move files from the old profile to the new one as that could lead to losing the files permanently. If restarting the PC doesn’t help, she should make a new profile and copy her data to that one directly.
Before making any changes, it might be smart to take the drive to a data recovery specialist. If encryption isn't an issue, the files should be recoverable. Also, keep in mind that sometimes even encrypted files can still be retrieved by professionals.
Okay, thank you! I’ll check that.