Computer Help - missing files

disneychrista

DIS Legend
Joined
Dec 26, 2002
Messages
28,086
On Sunday afternoon a friend helped me organized all my music into one folder on my laptop. Since for unknown reasons it seemed to be split into three different folders, some being duplicated. We then attempted to back all 22,089 songs to an external hard drive. After more than an hour it was still 0% complete so I stopped the back. When I went into the folder that had all the songs it was empty. It is like my music went POOF!! The thing is my hard drive usage is the same. So the music has to be somewhere, but where? It is not on the external hard drive, which we just reformatted and has NO FILES. I am more than devastated because most of the songs can not be simply redownloaded, as they came from various CD's that I no longer have.

Anyone have any ideas of where to look?
 
Do you still have the original CDs that your files came from? If not, unfortunately all your songs are in fact unrecoverable.
 
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I was going to say check the recycle bin. But if you reformatted the hard drive without running a back-up, that's a problem that may not be fixable.

Is it possible the songs are in a cloud account? Like iTunes?
 
I was going to say check the recycle bin. But if you reformatted the hard drive without running a back-up, that's a problem that may not be fixable.

Is it possible the songs are in a cloud account? Like iTunes?
We reformatted the external hard drive before we started the back-up. None of the missing files were ever on that drive. They aren't in the recycle bin. It would have taken HOURS for them to actually been deleted. And it was instantaneous. One second they were there and the next they were just gone.

Unfortunately not. A good 90% of the songs came from CD's and as far as I know not backed up into iTunes. SOME, like maybe 10%, of the songs are on my OneDrive but not all of them. I also have some on a flash drive. I am going to try to rebuild my library as much as I can, on a different computer, while we try to figure out what the hell happened.

Do you still have the original CDs that your files came from? If not, unfortunately all your songs are in fact unrecoverable.
No. I don't have most of the CD's that they came from.
 

We reformatted the external hard drive before we started the back-up.
Oh, you reformatted the external hard drive. I thought you meant you had reformatting the laptop hard drive. But they never copied over to the external drive and yet disappeared from the laptop? Most likely it was too much to transfer at once. When I have a lot of files I need to transfer I do them in small chunks. Is it possible your settings are "hiding" certain file types?
 
We reformatted the external hard drive before we started the back-up. None of the missing files were ever on that drive. They aren't in the recycle bin. It would have taken HOURS for them to actually been deleted. And it was instantaneous. One second they were there and the next they were just gone.

Unfortunately not. A good 90% of the songs came from CD's and as far as I know not backed up into iTunes. SOME, like maybe 10%, of the songs are on my OneDrive but not all of them. I also have some on a flash drive. I am going to try to rebuild my library as much as I can, on a different computer, while we try to figure out what the hell happened.


No. I don't have most of the CD's that they came from.
How did you try to backup the files? If you just did a "drag and drop", maybe you did a "move" instead of "copy"? And the files got "dropped" into some other folder/location?

If your laptop hard drive still shows the same space, there's a chance you just moved the files. Make sure you don't reboot. My next attempt would be letting windows search for the files itself (this is windows, not a mac, right?).

Open File Explorer. In the left column highlight 'This PC' (or might show the name of the computer). 1759858315690.png
Then type in the name of a single file in the upper right and hit return.

You can also try searching by the file extension. put "*.mp3" (or whatever the extension is. That should find all files with that extension.

You want to make sure you search "This PC", so it looks through all hard drives.
 





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