Documents Have Disappeared

Question

A large majority of my Word documents have disappeared. I always save them to my computer's downloads folder. I cannot find them in my Finder anymore, nor my trash or OneDrive. I'm not sure what to do. Please help!

Answer 1

Hi Jack,
That should not have happened. Did you save it to Documents or Downloads? Sometimes running Disk cleanup can clear Downloads folder, if the checkmark was intentionally checked.

See if the Freeware Recuva can find the files:

https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

I’m eager to hear back and work together to find a solution.

Standard 3rd party link disclaimer:

There may be links to non-Microsoft websites that provide accurate and safe information. Watch out for ads on websites frequently classified as PUP (Potentially Unwanted Products). There is no need to buy paid products to fix your computers, as they sometimes do more harm than good.

Answer 2

Like Sumit, I suspect something like CCleaner.

Long term, though, all hard drives seem to fail at some time (SSD drives, too). You should be keeping backups.

If you know the name of one of the documents you can't find, use a Windows Explorer search starting from your root drive like C:\ and try to find it. If you do, right-click on it in the found list and open the folder location.

IMO, the Downloads folder, like the Desktop, is not a good location for permanent storage of documents. In computing, I think it is taken for granted that this is a temporary storage location.
(I just checked and I have 9+ Gb in my Downloads folder. However, I don't think there is anything there that I can't do without. I regularly move anything I want to save eleswhere because I do purge that folder if I ever need space.)