Story time! Plus, has anyone seen this before under Windows 7?

So there I sat at home, working on a project. I set my laptop (running Windows 7) down next to me near the couch for about 2 hours and picked it back up around midnight.

My NetBeans IDE had totally crapped out and it acted as if none of my source files OR the project data files existed, plus it forgot my connection information to the SVN. I go rummaging around to find my project source/config files and none of them exist, I find only empty directories and sub-directories ... I then realized that my entire programming projects directory had been wiped of actual files and left only directories. And yes, I use SVN on my current working stuff, and I have the rest backed up.

After a few minutes of rubbing my eyes and checking an empty recycle bin I open up "Previous Versions" (Windows Restore) for the c:\dev directory. There were 5 restore points, 10:56 PM, 10:55 PM, 10:54 PM, 10:45 PM, and 9:41 PM. All except 9:41 PM were just as empty. Thankfully all my files were existing at 9:45 PM. What the hell happened there?

At first I thought NetBeans had just bugged out and deleted all my projects. But then I did some further digging and found my c:\eclipse dir was also empty, and I restored it ... although I haven't used eclipse in about a year. I also found under c:\games\ that my .\sierra\homeworld game files were strangely and totally deleted, although my .\steam dir was left untouched. Again, I also recovered it and like every other file on my hard drive, it had the same set of strange Restore points. I haven't found anything else missing yet ... I diff'd my entire Documents and Programs to be sure.

I had Microsoft Security Essentials running, and I ran other A/V scans to double check ... I got no positive matches for malicious anything, and I would've been surprised to find something since my usage is clean.

I still have no clue what happened to my file system at 10:45 PM a few days ago. I keep this thing locked down, including my wireless network.

Has anyone seen anything quite like this? Any thoughts on something else to check? Is this some random fluke of Windows 7's file management?

This is the only similar result I found through Google for this issue: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/3898-63-files-mysteriously-disappearing-drive

Thanks all for your helpful insights.

9/30/2010 9:03:17 PM

I've seen this thread before...

9/30/2010 9:18:25 PM

Why in God's name are you doing volume shadow copies on EVERY file?

Something is seriously wrong if your system is triggering shadow copies that often.

9/30/2010 10:49:26 PM

I've never seen this, but the age old question arises....

Learned to back up your stuff yet?

[Edited on September 30, 2010 at 11:39 PM. Reason : rawr grammar]

9/30/2010 11:39:00 PM

Quote :

"Why in God's name are you doing volume shadow copies on EVERY file? Something is seriously wrong if your system is triggering shadow copies that often."

That is my point. Something is wrong to have lost files and further trigger 4 VSCs in such quick succession. But I can't find anything wrong, nothing was going on at that time, and it hasn't happened again in the past few days.

Quote :

"Learned to back up your stuff yet?"

I learned that lesson a long time ago; as you'll notice, I said: I use SVN on my current working stuff, and I have the rest backed up.


I didn't post to complain about losing any data. I am just interesting in understanding this puzzle of a situation since I haven't seen anything like it in the past 20 years of my computer knowledge.

10/1/2010 12:41:14 PM

Probably would be worth while to run a diagnostic on your hard drive to see if it may be failing. Corrupt sectors on a drive can cause similar issues.

10/1/2010 12:51:48 PM

have you gone through your event logs on the machine? Something is seriously borked

10/1/2010 8:23:24 PM

^^Yep, all checks reported healthy.

^Yep, combed meticulously through them, nothing abnormal.



[Edited on October 2, 2010 at 12:28 AM. Reason : .]

10/2/2010 12:28:20 AM