I'm feeling under the weather today, trying to shake off this flu, but I just found out that my dad's computer is acting up. He turned it on and now all his files are missing—no folders, no documents, nothing. The only things still there are the programs. Also, he has McAfee antivirus installed, which I'm thinking about uninstalling. He usually leaves the computer in sleep mode instead of shutting it down completely. The strange part is that his files were definitely there last night. What should I do to recover them?
4 Answers
It’s possible that a cloud backup service like OneDrive or Google Drive is causing the issue. Sometimes people get signed out and the files won’t appear on the PC, only in the cloud. Check if OneDrive needs logging in again or if he has any other online storage that could be affected.
If files were deleted, they might still be recoverable. When a file is deleted, the data is not physically removed right away; it just gets marked as free space. You could try using free file recovery software to see if you can scan and restore those 'deleted' files.
First off, try restarting the computer. Sometimes it gets logged in as a guest or into a temporary profile, which would explain why the files are missing. If it’s a temporary profile, your dad’s files might still be safe, just not accessible.
After restarting, if the background is still black, it sounds like it indeed logged him into a temp profile. You might need to log out and log back in to the correct one.
Before trying anything drastic, you should contact a computer tech who can check it out. You wouldn’t want to accidentally do something that might permanently lose those files. Make sure nothing was done after the files went missing.
Good point! Just be careful not to write new data to the disk, as that could overwrite the space where the deleted files are.