Lost All files from Documents After Restart – No Recovery Found

glasskuter · Monday at 1:39 PM

pseymour said:
As kelper thread, this seems to be a drive-by thread, until we get more clarification.

Seems so. I'm absolutely amazed by some of the things users do. I truly think folks act without even considering there may be repurcussions.

TairikuOkami · Monday at 2:39 PM

Microsoft 365 subscriber can restore the whole OneDrive's folder within 30 days listing all changes.

Restore your OneDrive - Microsoft Support

Learn how to restore OneDrive to a previous time, if your files get deleted, corrupted, or infected by malware.

support.microsoft.com

P.S. Always backup your files! OneDrive is not really a backup, it is mirroring. The same thing (as to OP) happened to me twice.

TraderGary · Monday at 2:57 PM

TairikuOkami said:
Microsoft 365 subscriber can restore the whole OneDrive's folder within 30 days listing all changes.

Restore your OneDrive - Microsoft Support

Learn how to restore OneDrive to a previous time, if your files get deleted, corrupted, or infected by malware.

support.microsoft.com

View attachment 136406

P.S. Always backup your files! OneDrive is not really a backup, it is mirroring. The same thing (as to OP) happened to me twice.

Yes, just as I said in my previous Post 19, but you've illustrated it better. Few bother to understand what OneDrive is and how it works.

OneDrive is a powerful and valuable part of my total backup strategy, but as you say, it constantly mirrors your data in real-time and by itself is not a true backup.

So many have lost data by not understanding that their deleted data is still there in cloud OneDrive Recycle Bin for 30 days and fully recoverable!

pseymour · Monday at 3:00 PM

OneDrive may hold data even longer if this is a school/enterprise-type situation. Admins can put litigation holds on it to extend the time period before something is really deleted.

Winuser · Monday at 6:43 PM

pseymour said:
Homies,

If you redirect the Documents folder to the Desktop, the folder goes away, and it disappears from Explorer. There is no right-clicking on the docs folder to redirect it back to its original location. That's why you get this big scary message when you do it.

View attachment 136401

Now that's scary warning! Without a backup there's no way I would click on Yes.

Winuser · Monday at 6:49 PM

glasskuter said:
her original document folder was not in her user folder to start with. It was in Onedrive.

One drive has a recycle bin. Maybe the lost files are located there.

Winuser · Monday at 7:09 PM

TraderGary said:
So many have lost data by not understanding that their deleted data is still there in cloud OneDrive Recycle Bin for 30 days and fully recoverable!

pseymour said:
OneDrive may hold data even longer if this is a school/enterprise-type situation. Admins can put litigation holds on it to extend the time period before something is really deleted.

I'm totally surprised that a teacher would do something like this without being sure they had the files backed up first. If it was a student doing it with their personal computer i could understand but not a teacher. I pity the students in his/her class room.

pseymour · Monday at 7:51 PM

I work in higher ed. It’s the teachers that do stuff like this, not the students.

andrew129260 · Monday at 8:16 PM

Winuser said:
I'm totally surprised that a teacher would do something like this without being sure they had the files backed up first.

I'm not. I worked at a high school for a long time. I had teachers with masters degrees who would put in a ticket because their projector wasnt working.

It wasn't plugged in. But yeah, I'm the dumb one

. This happened all the time!!

I say this because the master degree teachers were the kinda people that would talk down to you like you were stupid, just the dumb IT guy.......yeah

pseymour said:
I work in higher ed. It’s the teachers that do stuff like this, not the students.

The students just find ways around the internet filtering.

andrew129260 · Monday at 8:40 PM

pseymour said:
Homies,

If you redirect the Documents folder to the Desktop, the folder goes away, and it disappears from Explorer. There is no right-clicking on the docs folder to redirect it back to its original location. That's why you get this big scary message when you do it.

View attachment 136401

to expand on this, when this happens it dumps all the contents of the documents folder onto the desktop. I just tested it in a VM.

To restore the documents folder, you can follow this:

Move or Restore Default Location of Documents Folder in Windows 11

This tutorial will show you how to move or restore the default location of the Documents folder for your account in Windows 10 and Windows 11. The Documents folder (shell:personal) is a component of the user profile that is used as a unified location for storing personal data. By default, the...

www.elevenforum.com

This only restores the documents folder to its correct location not the data unfortunately.

But the files should be on their desktop that were in the documents folder. In this case, the onedrive folder most likely moved to the desktop, and inside that should have the onedrive - documents folder.

Hopefully.

I wonder if the teacher has a mapped network drive that they moved it to by accident. Or a public share drive.

glasskuter · Monday at 8:51 PM

As @kelper mentioned in an earlier thread, Y'all need to read the OP's entire thread. Besides, it appears he's ghosted.

pseymour · Monday at 8:54 PM

glasskuter said:
As @kelper mentioned in an earlier thread, Y'all need to read the OP's entire thread. Besides, it appears he's ghosted.

Why are you assuming we didn’t?

andrew129260 · Monday at 8:55 PM

pseymour said:
Why are you assuming we didn’t?

because people are talking about onedrive recycle and they already tried that. They can still try the go back in time method, which hopefully would work.

I am wondering if the teacher moved it to a mapped network drive (assuming if they have those) by accident and not the desktop like they thought. Users lie all the time. It's possible it's on a external drive or something else. Heck it might not even have anything to do with their documents folder.

They could have put it all in the recycle bin because they liked storing files there for some dumb reason and then it got cleared and they lost everything.

Users rarely tell the truth.

Winuser said:
Are you saying that the teacher is book smart and street stupid? I If you are I find this to be true more than it should.

Well they cannot read message prompts either. So not sure

. It honestly would not have bugged me so much it if it didn't happen so often and they didn't have such a holier than thou attitude at all times. The students were way better than teachers at my school. That was my experience at least.

glasskuter said:
Besides, it appears he's ghosted.

I doubt they have ghosted yet. Probably be back in a day or so.

glasskuter · Monday at 9:10 PM

pseymour said:
Why are you assuming we didn’t?

Because some folks keep suggesting doing either things he's already tried or repeating things that others have suggested he try.

Bree · Monday at 9:30 PM

glasskuter said:
you can not move a default user folder into another default user folder.

pseymour said:
Right, but you can move the contents of the folder into another user folder, and the original will disappear. I did it in VM to grab that screenshot above.

Yes, it is all too easy to merge one of these 'special' folders with another - and almost impossible to prise them apart after the event. According to MS's warning it's not possible to separate them.

I did that for one user that had ignored pseymour's 'big scary message', or rather, this one....

It happens a bit too often, so I wrote it up as a tutorial. It may help unravel what has gone on here....

Undo: Merged your Pictures folder with your User folder

accidentally mergng your Pictures folder with your User folder is easy to do but more difficult to correct

www.tenforums.com

Morph000 · Tuesday at 12:59 AM

Anyone notice this?

Teacher attempted to move the Documents folder to the Desktop.

Key word is "attempted" suggesting it didn't work, a factor that drives the response, like also knowing what Windows updates were applied after the event.
Otherwise OP would have written
"Teacher moved the Documents folder to the Desktop."
Why do I get the feeling OP is a student who effed it up and wants answers before the teacher finds out.

Gone dark now so probably all irrelevant...

XxXxX · Tuesday at 2:38 AM

Morph000 said:
Anyone notice this?

Key word is "attempted" suggesting it didn't work, a factor that drives the response, like also knowing what Windows updates were applied after the event.
Otherwise OP would have written
"Teacher moved the Documents folder to the Desktop."
Why do I get the feeling OP is a student who effed it up and wants answers before the teacher finds out.
Gone dark now so probably all irrelevant...

well as a famous writer once wrote.
once you have eliminated all probabilities, no matter what is left however improbable, is probably the truth.

something like that anyway.
best of luck, Steve ..

kelper · Tuesday at 3:27 AM

That was Sherlock Holmes!

fgr1990 · Tuesday at 5:50 AM

Hi everyone,

First of all, thank you all so much for your help and involvement so far—it's really appreciated.

Just to update you on where we are with the issue of the disappearing document files on the teacher’s laptop:

The files are not on OneDrive, not even in the Recycle Bin. The teacher wasn’t actively using OneDrive, even though we do recommend it.
We’ve tried searching for the files manually and also used recovery tools like Recuva, but nothing relevant came up. Interestingly, Recuva did find some document files from previous user profiles, but not his—almost as if the files were never there to begin with.
If the default save location had somehow been changed, would the files still be discoverable via a system-wide search? Because so far, even that hasn’t turned up anything.
I still need to double-check whether the folder is set to show hidden files, but I’m assuming recovery software like Recuva would have picked them up even if they were hidden—correct me if I’m wrong.
I like the idea that the files might have been moved somewhere else on the network, but the teacher doesn’t have access to any network drives or shared locations. That said, folder redirection is something we haven’t looked into yet. It’s a good shout and might be worth investigating, even though we had almost given up hope.
I’m not exactly sure what the teacher did—keyword being exactly. I’ll need to ask him again if you think a step-by-step of his actions might help shed some light.

Apologies for the delay in replying—I'm based in the UK and finished work at 5pm. Just getting back to this now

Thanks again for all your suggestions so far. Any further ideas are more than welcome!

XxXxX · Tuesday at 6:09 AM

Q.
did they have a USB thumb drive attached to the computer when they attempted to move the folder?

best of luck, Steve ..

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