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Ran Disk Defrag, and Disk Cleanup...now files are missing

Hi,

I ran a the Defragmentor, and Cleanup, and now 4 folders have disappeared out of "my documents." Any ideas?

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Delphineous Silverwing

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jcimarron

jenmacias--Have you looked in the Recycle Bin?
If no luck see if you can find them elsewhere on the hard drive, by running Search. Enter any part of the name of each file.
And if still no luck use an Undelete program. One that is small enough to put on a floppy is Restoration
http://www.webattack.com/get/restoration.html
If you have no floppy drive, then see if you can get a friend to burn a copy for you onto a CD/DVD so you can run the program from there.
The reason for not just downloading to your hard drive is that the missing files are hopefully on the hard drive, but hidden, and you want to avoid writing to the drive, if you can, so you do not overwrite the missing files. Other good Undelete programs are
http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1 and
http://www.recuva.com/

aleghart

Under normal circumstances, Defrag will not delete files.

But, if the files were damaged prior, or if you power-cycled the computer during defrag, the files will disappear, and may not be recoverable.

Were you having specific problems before defrag and "cleanup"?

I don't do it any more. Frequent re-builds or image restoration (at least once a year) and/or transferring files en masse between drives will take care of any file fragmentation for me. YMMC. Also serves as a rudimentary disaster recovery routine.