Files Randomly Disappearing From Hard Drive

AlwaysSomething

This is very weird. Files and folders, large and small, have started disappearing from my external hard disk. It's an 8Tb drive with about 6Gb of stuff on it. I noticed several files and folders missing today, which were present yesterday. Had a poke around, and saw some other, totally unrelated files were also gone. Checked with ScanDisk - no problems. Checked the SMART status with CrystalDiskInfo - all good.  What are the chances that a problem with a drive could delete files without flagging an error? Can anyone suggest what might be going on? Is there a virus that does this?    My C: drive seems to be intact, though it's hard to check since I don't know where a file might go missing from.

Thanks

debitcardmayhem

I would check the disk using a live linux usb (yeah I know) and run something like testdisk, of course you could use that under windows too I will find the link in a moment

here we go https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download (had to wait for my pc to boot up , mind you I could have googled it doh!

Heres the doc for it https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

JJ_Egan

External  pulling the plug to soon is one reason .

inspectorperez

AlwaysSomething said:

This is very weird. Files and folders, large and small, have started disappearing from my external hard disk. It's an 8Tb drive with about 6Gb of stuff on it. I noticed several files and folders missing today, which were present yesterday. Had a poke around, and saw some other, totally unrelated files were also gone. Checked with ScanDisk - no problems. Checked the SMART status with CrystalDiskInfo - all good.  What are the chances that a problem with a drive could delete files without flagging an error? Can anyone suggest what might be going on? Is there a virus that does this?    My C: drive seems to be intact, though it's hard to check since I don't know where a file might go missing from.

Thanks

Couple of thoughts. Do you have a remote external drive? I am assuming you are currently not backing up your files. You could replicate your documents folder in an external drive and save your files twice (once on each drive) in order to at least have a backup and establish beyond doubt that there is a problem on the C drive. You could of course set up a backup routine in windows settings, but there you would have the risk of losing a file before it was backed up.

The other thought is to review your Events logs to see if there is an Event warning message being logged.

Just one more thing, it isn't possible that the missing files have been saved in OneDrive. This is a very annoying default setting I find which is persuading users to use the cloud as first port of call for storing documents.

Oh, and another "one more thing", check your hidden files settings in Folder View.

Do you have "Controlled Access Folder" switched on? This can sometimes cause problems.

Sorry this reply is not structured but I'm writing it just as possible causes come to mind!!