Windows 7: Major issue-Please Help-Lost files

i have an encountered a major issue. it all started when i ran an anitvirus scan with vipre antivrus 2013...after i ran the scan some virus's were detected and i removed them. after i removed the virus's, i mysteriously had gained hard drive space on all 3 of my drives. when i ran the anitvirus scan i figured i had removed a virus which was conflicting with the reading of the hard drives and figured that the hard drives were giving a false reading. well, i was excited that i had more room, so i took an archive folder which i had made on my c drive (because all the secondary hard drives were full) full of downloaded programs, games etc., and moved all the files to my secondary drives. today, i just realized that now a lot of my files have been erased or are invisible on my secondary drives. directory and folder structure is there, but when i open the folder, files are missing. i have lost a huge chunk of my archive. please help. wtf happened haha??? is there anyway to recover from this??? have i permanently lost my files???



p.s. i installed windows 7 on my 4th drive and booted it up to see if i could see my files, and on a fresh installation of windows, the files are still missing


running windows 7 ultimate 64 bit
i have 4 hard drives
1. primary-2tb
2. secondary-1.5tb
3. secondary-1tb
4. secondary-500gb

If you have restore points on that drive, you can recover them with Shadow Explorer: ShadowExplorer - Recover Lost Files and Folders

i dont know if i have restore points. are you asking me if i backed up my secondary drives with windows??? if thats the case, the answer is no. i never backed up my secondary drives

Do the following: Open an elevated command prompt and run this command

vssadmin list shadows

It will list all the restore points you have on all the drives/partitions.

OK it says I have 1 shadow copy 12/5/2012 on my c drive. Wen I open shadow explorer, it won't even read any of my other drives when I select them from the drop down menu

So that's all you can work with. I always recommend to enable restore points on data partitions to be prepaired for incidents. On data partitions they do not take a lot of space but are a good life insurance.

The optimal solution is, of course, frequent imaging of all relevant partitions.

ok. well this is the most important question i could ever ask....if i made a backup image of my c drive and one day in the future wanted to reformat my computer, on a fresh installation of windows, would i be able to restore that image file and have everything work as it does now????

If you restore the image, you get exactly the state that you imaged.