I've been transferring photos and videos of my children from my Android phone to my Windows PC to free up space. My phone is full again, but when I connected it today, the older desktop folders containing years of photos and videos were no longer visible. These files are extremely important to me.
I checked the Recycle Bin and found nothing, enabled hidden files, and confirmed that OneDrive is not currently connected or signed in. The phone is Android, and the computer is an Alienware X51 R2. What could have happened to the folders, and what should I try before risking the files further?
1 Answer
First, avoid copying anything else to the PC, installing recovery tools, running Disk Cleanup or CHKDSK, defragmenting, or resetting Windows. Also don’t delete or move anything on the phone. Since the photos are irreplaceable, minimize use of the computer until you know where the files went.
In File Explorer, check the locations directly rather than relying only on the desktop view: your normal user folder, every folder under C:Users, C:UsersPublicDesktop, any OneDrive folder, and C:Windows.oldUsers. Look inside each account’s Desktop, Pictures, and OneDriveDesktop folders. A duplicate username, TEMP folder, or newly created profile could mean Windows signed you into a temporary profile.
Then select This PC and search separately for common photo and video extensions such as *.jpg, *.jpeg, *.heic, *.mov, and *.mp4. If you find even one file, use Open file location to identify the missing folder. If nothing turns up, stop using the drive and consider professional data recovery rather than installing recovery software onto that same disk.
The safest next step is to avoid further writes to the computer and have the drive examined from separate recovery media or by a reputable data-recovery service. Recovery advice depends on whether the files were on an HDD or SSD, and an SSD may have already reclaimed deleted data through TRIM.
I checked the user folders and searched for those file types, but I still can’t find anything. I’m really upset and don’t want to make the situation worse.