Missing / Deleted (?) Folder

[DanielMMS]

Slightly strange one but I have no idea what to do about this so over to the omniscient users of OC.

My wife was using her PC today. I won't bore you with the details, but she decided to make a copy of her "My Documents" folder by copying and pasting to a different drive just in case she deleted something in the original. She finished what she was doing successfully and deleted the copy. Unfortunately, the original has disappeared and I simply cannot work out how!

I've run Recuva on the original location and nothing is coming up as having been deleted. Unfortunately, it can't recover the deleted files from the copy drive since the locations have been overwritten.

The only thing I can think of is that she might have moved the folder to a different drive rather than copying it - this might explain why no files are showing as having being deleted from the C drive. The strange thing is, though, that the used space on the C drive remains the same and there were about 10GB of data in My Documents - this seems to imply that the data is still there somewhere. I've tried to search for individual files (having changed the settings to include hidden files) in case they have been moved but cannot find anything.

It is not the end of the world since I run a daily back up on her PC but, typically, she has lost a major bit of work that she had being doing on that particular day!

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I might find the missing / hiding files?

 

[Diagro]

Try looking in disk cleanup, if it shows a 10gb file click on the view files button.. you never know

 

[DanielMMS]

Nice idea but unfortunately not!

 

[wp-t31os]

You cannot just move or copy(then delete) the My Documents folder, Windows has expectations of that directory existing(and stores certain data there). You can move it properly in Windows though, and it is supported functionality, but the correct way to do this is to right click the folder, click on properties, switch to the "Location" tab, then choose the "Move" option to relocate it(i do this for several user directories to free up space on C myself).

The actual location of the "My Documents" directory is...

Windows Vista / 7
C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents

Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents

First step, check if the directory is still there(it should be, unless you've already moved it using the procedure i outlined above).