Windows 7: Disappearing Files

I don't know that this is a hardware issue, but I'll post here regardless. A couple of days ago, a file that I had encoded never appeared in it's destination folder, even though the encoder took the normal amount of time, and announced that it had completed successfully. This happened again today, using a different encoder and a different video file. On the second attempt it went normally.

I would have wrote these off as flukes, but I just went into the Recycle Bin to restore some files that I had deleted, and only two of the three were there. Of course, this could be a software issue, but if it is, it must be with Windows 7, rather than the encoders, because of the variations involved.

I've never had anything like this happen before, so I have no idea of where to start...HELP!

I doubt its a windows issue. Audio/video encoders (thats what you mean?) are somewhat finicky in my experience. There could have been data corruption in the file being encoded and the encoder could have aborted but the progress bar could have progressed merrily. Or some parameter may not have worked in the first go.

As for the recycle bin mystery, check its disk use space- older files may have been deleted to make room for new ones. Or if you use something like CCleaner, that could have deleted the file.

You can also try reinstalling the encoder or checking its settings.

I shall reinstall one of the encoders (HandBrake), because it seems to have developed some issues, but I do not discount the possibility of a Windows 7 problem, because of the Recycle Bin problem I described. The Recycle Bin was empty, except for those three files (actually 2), and I did not use CCleaner or any like that. I deleted the files, and because of other issues, I rebooted a few minutes later and immediately went to the bin to restore them. Nothing was done between these times, except some tinkering with HandBrake, and I do not think that it would be capable of meddling with the Recycle Bin.

Could you be running up against your Recycle Bin's size limit? If you delete more files than can "fit" into the limit they are permanently deleted.

My Recycle Bin is set at about 4.5GB. So if I try and delete two 3.1GB video files then one will be in the bin and the other is gone. However I do get a warning.

That may well be the issue, because the size is set for only 3.99GBs globally, which is too small. However, I just attempted to disable the global configuration, and set a larger size, but even after applying that, it remains at the original size. Maybe it requires a reboot to complete the configuration, but I have an ongoing operation active at the moment that prevents that. In any case, I never received any kind of warning.

That no warning may have something to do with Manual vs Automatic deletion.

Restart is sometimes required for the settings to stick.

I just deleted a folder containg ~ 3.8GBs of files, then restored them, and the folder was totally empty. Something is awry, but I'm not positive as to what, because even with only 3.99GB for the Recycle Bin, it should have held all of them.

Agreed. If you delete the files, and they show up in the Recycle Bin, then you Restore them, and they don't show up back where they came from then that is definitely not right.
And that sounds like a file system issue.

Have you tried a global search for the files?