Files Really Gone?

I am missing well over 1000 files. A good deal of those are .gif files. When I go to the child folder they were in, it is empty as are all the child folders. When I use Windows Search to search the parent folder for *.gif, the results show 1000 of the files in the child folder they were in. They appear with the Irfanview icon, which is the default viewer and a .gif extension. They are way too small, < 1 kb. Irfanview cant open them, "...cant read the file header. unknown file format or file not found." I admit Im fried enough to have some how, possibly, maybe deleted a whole folder while doing a clean up, but it is still there and I cant possibly imagine selecting that many files and doing anything with all of them, let alone deleting them. Please tell me Im missing something here, besides the files.



Windows 7 Home Premium SP1

I was just typing that I hope I'll be wearing the monkey suit because that would mean it turned out the files didnt go anywhere it was just something stupid. In my fit of school girl hysteria (no offense ladies) I neglected to include one small detail - this drive is an external USB drive. As I calmed down, I realized that the problem existed for all the folders on the drive. The drive properties said there was 80GB free of 465GB. So the files were still there, but...what? I dont know. I cycled the power on the drive and it was like magic - I could access all the files. So what was going on before I did that? Was what I saw before, when I did a Windows search for *.gif on that drive, the file names cached somewhere which showed up when Windows searched?


My suit size is 48 tall.

richc46 said:

You made a mistake, I made many. Glad that it worked out.

Not as many as I make


What were those files that the search found though?

squidgy said:

I am missing well over 1000 files. A good deal of those are .gif files. When I go to the child folder they were in, it is empty as are all the child folders. When I use Windows Search to search the parent folder for *.gif, the results show 1000 of the files in the child folder they were in. They appear with the Irfanview icon, which is the default viewer and a .gif extension. They are way too small, < 1 kb. Irfanview cant open them, "...cant read the file header. unknown file format or file not found." I admit Im fried enough to have some how, possibly, maybe deleted a whole folder while doing a clean up, but it is still there and I cant possibly imagine selecting that many files and doing anything with all of them, let alone deleting them. Please tell me Im missing something here, besides the files.



Windows 7 Home Premium SP1

Please tell me that you have backups on an external drive or thumb drive.

MacGyvr said:

Please tell me that you have backups on an external drive or thumb drive.

That is the external drive. Im using Mozy, however these files were not in the backup set. Needless to say, they are now.