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#1
Half of desktop icons mysteriously disappeared
Hi guys,
I searched long and hard on Google for a solution to this and while there are several instances of this happening I am not sure if any of the solutions pertain to my situation.
I purchased a new computer recently and the other day decided to migrate some of my old data to the new system via a USB enclosure housing my old hard drive. I was moving files all over the place and when I was finally finished copying the files over I went back to my desktop to be greeted with about half of the icons I had from two hours earlier. I am pretty tech savvy so I don't think I did this by accident.
Now it's worth mentioning that the missing desktop files are still present in the Desktop folder in Windows Explorer, but have somehow become absent on the desktop itself. Another factor to consider is that I was doing these file migrations late Sunday night. I have read that Windows 7 has some sort of option enabled by default that purges "unused" icons every Monday at 1AM. Could this have been what happened? It's a brand new PC! How does Windows know I wasn't going to use those shortcuts?!
Anyway, please see the following screenshots of the Desktop folders. The first one shows the icons that were on my Desktop before the half disappeared. And the second screenshot corresponds with how the Desktop looks now. And I am actually not sure why there are two Desktop folder instances.. pretty sure I only created the one user that it forced me to during setup. Anyway, sorry for this being long but I'd really appreciate some insight on how to remedy this and how to prevent it from happening again!