I'm right there with you although my exp was a mite different..... it was IMO Right out of the Twilight Zone stuff
I have a 1TB NAS drive I run as one Big Drive, instead of the two 500s it has inside and mirror them. I back up to a 1.5TB USB/SATA drive I put into a portable enclosure for such purposes. It just lays dormant following the periodic backing up (s).
The NAS has 3 parent folders two of which are secured. And one is public.
The Public folder is where all my media content resides amongst various subfolders. Presently, 500GB +.
Well come back to all this momentarily .
My Toshiba laptop was delivered to me with an EVALUATION copy of Vista already installed upon it. Evaluation copy? Yep. It had a logo saying so down by the system tray. So what I thought . Never having owned a Vista OS, or a Toshiba machine. No warnings, no glitches etc, ever, so why worry?
2 yrs out from its initial delivery date it began to time out. Shut down and then immediately restart. No warnings at all unless you were watching the clock. At one and a half hours, it automatically would repeat the process, ad nausea!
There was indeed one info window saying, Enter a valid ID number, register this version of Vista online, or buy a license.but it said nothing about the updcoming consequences.
Never having heard of anything like this and owning several computers currently & for the past decade as well, I attempted to auto register with my available OS I.D. info I got from the laptop and from the label on its under carriage. It said the registration was successful or had been completed, but the same result began all over again. I even called Microsoft but that was a waste of time.
Hence the multi hour assisted re-install using the provided reinstallation discs. A-freakin-mazing!
Finally all was well following the clean install of the Vista OS, so the reloading of updates, applications and their settings process began.
Coming home Sunday after a church oriented 4th of July picnic I set about finishing that reload of apps and settings onto my laptop. I will say I was fading in and out during the process and decided to stretch out for a bit but was hanging in there stubbornly, setting up playlists and trying different output configurations with the various players. Ultimately after a few head smapbacks from nodding off I cashed it in, setting both the machine and myself to sleep mode.
Soon thereafter, I got right back after things with the laptop and thats when I found the files were then missing.
While using the restored laptop, I opened up my fav media player to dig some tunes.. Some Way or other, the non secured sub folder containing the 500GB + of music and videos had gone missing. It made like a banana and split!! I was clueless. 500GB of data just vanished. Poof!
Weird huh!
No crashes. No lightening strikes or power outages. Nada. Nothing out of the ordinary happened at all.
Sure it was all backed up thankfully, but even copying back on that much content takes the better part of a day to do.
Properties report for the NAS drive said it had all the data still, but the largest folder containing what I wanted, wasnt in the spot it was supposed to be. Doing a Properties report on each of the parent and their sub folders showed only 10GB of data. Lovely.
To make a long story more monotonous, I used a command prompt and DOS, to seek the directory of the fugitive folder. If there was still one to find.
That did it! The renegade folder had relocated itself somehow into an adjacent one, thus hiding itself from view. Well, my view anyhow. Copying and pasting it back to the orig directory all was restored.
Whew! Double Whew!
Every dark cloud we see up in the sky is shining on its other side.
It can however take a while to realize it. Especially when it is still raining on you.