Something VERY strange happened today

A

a!!!!1

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 8, 2009
Messages
95
About 3 days ago, I created a folder on my desktop, and saved a few pictures and a couple text files to it.

Today, I was browsing the internet and noticed my desktop flash, as if I had just refreshed it. It took me awhile to notice the difference, but after a few seconds I noticed that my folder no longer showed a preview of the files inside it and instead just showed the default folder icon. I clicked on it, and all the files were gone!

I looked at its properties and strangely enough, Windows said the folder had just been created 1 minute ago. It's as if the folder just deleted itself, and then remade itself but without its contents.

I ran Recuva and Undelete and neither had any record of files on the desktop being deleted. It's almost as if this folder never existed, and the files weren't deleted, they were just completely removed.

I'm not too concerned about recovering the files because they weren't that important, but I would like to know what caused this. Could this be an indication that my drive is about to fail? It's an Intel SSD, about 2 years old, no errors showing in HD Tune, and everything else appears to be running fine.
 
Just finished a customer build with this same mobo. Very impressive performance with very little desktop real estate. Would love to build another for myself!
 
Have you run a disk check yet? That's what I would do first. It's possible something is corrupted.
 
Any chance Microsoft Security Essentials/Windows Defender thought they could be viral and placed them in Quarantine? Do you have any kind of Cloud backing up/syncing enabled?
 
jrweis - What?

timta2 - Yes. Everything appears to be fine.

Babel-17 - As far as I remember I disabled Windows Defender as much as possible because I use Kaspersky and Malwarebytes already. The only backup syncing I have is Crashplan.
 
a!!!!1 said:
jrweis - What?

timta2 - Yes. Everything appears to be fine.

Babel-17 - As far as I remember I disabled Windows Defender as much as possible because I use Kaspersky and Malwarebytes already. The only backup syncing I have is Crashplan.
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If Kaspersky or Malwarebytes does scans then they might also have some sort of quarantine for stuff that seems suspicious. Can't hurt to check. Good luck tracking this down, it's got me curious as well.
 
Investigate the possibility that they were marked as hidden and are still actually in the folder.
 
jojo69 said:
you got aids
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Thank you for your courage in the face of the forum moderators - it has given me 7 minutes of teary-eyed laughter I desperately needed.

If I wanted to make a joke, I'd say it was a clear example how piracy works - your files were STOLEN.

But, to be serious, as data loss is, I think you should first of all consider this might be malware behavior. You were saving files to that directory from the internet, right? So the browser had a handle on the folder or at the very least remembered the name.
It's possible that the browser picked up something nasty which managed to quickly escalate the browser's process privileges, maybe even 'fork' it under a false account.
That way, when you tried to save something later on, you might have been saving to a folder with such a name but on a different account.
I'd boot into safe mode, ensure folder options are set to show everything (double check the options stick!) and start exploring c:\users.

Also, your user profile folder might have become corrupt due to a hardware glitch.

Another theory would be that you accidentally mashed some keyboard shortcuts and switched the working directory or something.

Either way I'd start digging for files, preferably using a known good system (live cd? safe mode at the very least).
 
Desktop cleanup deleted them? I know it deletes unused icons but not sure what id does with things inside of it. All the files on the desktop are stored in \users\userid\desktop
 
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