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Quite a complex quiz for users community. Something wrong has occurred, a disaster, to my laptop Asus X751 - for no visual reason, all the files/documents in the Documents folder, as well as in the Downloads folder, have completely disappeared, vanished from PC !...
Enigma misterioso, what might be probable cause for such a drastic elimination/ erasing/destruction of the documents/files in both folders - installing of a new program Bastyon (might change the file structure?), some failure in the OS Windows 8.1 ? (though neither the antivirus nor the CCleaner showed any signs of errata), some errors [suspicious activity] on the Hard Drive ?, or an attack (intrusion) by a hacker or somebody else ?... All the working files have disappeared so dramatically, instantly, and no file recovery program at hand could restore them, just some remnants...
So far, no one could comprehensibly answer this riddle yet...
As for me, I suspect, the reason might be in accumulated errors on the hard disk which haven't been checked for a very long time (besides, few months ago I changed the HDD hard drive to an SSD), as a result, the check reported "suspicious activity on the hard drive" and some "inacceptable long file names"...
Would be obliged to know any relevant reasons for the corrupted files in both folders :)
I'm sorry but forum users do not have anything that we can query to find out what processes deleted files from your computer. And if you have "suspicious activity on the hard drive" and some "inacceptable long file names"... we have no idea what happened on your PC.
As a "best practice" a periodic backup should be taken of important files so that they can be restored in the event of an accidental or malicious deletion. If you don't have a backup, then I don't think that we can help you.
Thanx, Sir, for clear response. Indeed the matter is quite complex and has no plain solution. Surely, everybody needs to do the preventive steps to secure his/her data due to unreliability of technical devices: namely, the corresponding backups, as You mentioned, and file system regular checkups.
Unfortunately, no available lost-files-recovery software could ever help me (and others) in this sad matter...
Cheers anyway
:))
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If the recovery software fails to recover, then there is no way to restore them.
Always keep backups and use a system restore point.