This sad sequence of events just happened to a relative, and they're distraught. I haven't used Windows for ~15 years but since it was my area of expertise back then I still get lumbered with these problems. This one really surprised me though.

They logged into Windows 7 (I know, upgrade...) and it looked like their files were missing. In a panic, they opened Explorer and searched for their files. They turned up in the search. They just didn't show up in the usual "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Videos" paths.

They decided to move the files "to the correct place". And then they shut the computer down.

The next time they started it, the same thing happened. This is where I got called in, because this time, the files didn't show up in a search. I told them to turn the computer off immediately and drop it with me.

Can you guess what happened? Well, check this out:

- Windows couldn't use their user profile because it was corrupted

- So it created a temporary profile in "C:\Users\TEMP". (This wasn't obvious to the user because Explorer hides the 'detail' of the file path and simply shows the username)

- Unwittingly, when they moved the precious files to the "correct" place, they were putting them into a temporary profile.

- On shutdown, Windows promptly deleted the temporary profile, so "C:\Users\TEMP" got wiped along with all of the files.

I was frankly astonished that Windows would drop them into a temporary user profile without dire warnings about its transience. Anyway, now I have to try to recover not only the files, but the directory structures. I'm not even sure it's possible... :(

user:	anvic
created:	September 14, 2022
karma:	-17