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jack20

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Files and folders Disappeared

I was working on organising some 112 zip folders containing some training files that I purchased recently. These were located on an external 3 TB Seagate hard drive (separately powered).

When I was almost done, I suddenly noticed that all except one of the folders had simply disappeared.

I have been desperately trying to find those files, thinking that perhaps I may have accidentally moved them to another folder, but no, those files no longer exist on that drive.

Currently I am in the process of running chkdsk /h /f /r /x on that drive and hoping something would come up. Besides a friend suggested it could be that the allocation tables are corrupt so I might have to resort to expensive data recovery tools or services.

Any help would be welcome from this forum please. Those files together cost me about $800!!
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Dr. Klahn

Abort the chkdsk immediately.  This will only make the situation worse.  More to come ....
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Dr. Klahn

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are you sure they were on that drive?
could they not have been on another drive?

regarding data recovery; i use GetDataBack : http://www.runtime.org/      
it lets you scan for free and show what can be rcovered; you only pay for storing the data
Maybe you moved them into temp folder on your system. Type in local search pane %temp% and press enter. See if your missing data is there.
I must agree with @nobus on this one.
In 99% of the cases the files have been moved to another location... mouse drag, key click ... anything can happen.
I would instead try to look for them on another drive / location before you jump to conclusion they are deleted.
the reason i asked was that i had that happening yesterday to me...lol
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ASKER

Thanks everyone for your great answers.

It appears that the most likely thing to have happened is an unintentional delete of the master folder. I had a licence of Easeus and it showed up under recycle bin (I have a bad habit of cleaning the bin too frequently).

I’ve just put Easeus on recover mode and am waiting for results.

And yes I did stop CHKDSK as it was looking to be an useless exercise.

Hoping that I am a able to recover all my files.
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ASKER

Still waiting for the result from the recovery tool
why close before you have a result?
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ASKER

Hi the advice from Dr. Klahn worked. of course the CHKDSK did a little damage to a few zip folders but on the whole it worked and I thank you for it.