Title: This sad sequence of events just happened to a relative, and they&#x27;re distraught. I haven&#x27;t used Windows for ~15 years but since it was my area of expertise back then I still get lumbered with these problems. This one really surprised me though.<p>They logged into Windows 7 (I know, upgrade...) and it looked like their files were missing. In a panic, they opened Explorer and searched for their files. They turned up in the search. They just didn&#x27;t show up in the usual &quot;My Documents&quot;, &quot;My Pictures&quot;, &quot;My Videos&quot; paths.<p>They decided to move the files &quot;to the correct place&quot;. And then they shut the computer down.<p>The next time they started it, the same thing happened. This is where I got called in, because <i>this</i> time, the files didn&#x27;t show up in a search. I told them to turn the computer off immediately and drop it with me.<p>Can you guess what happened? Well, check this out:<p>- Windows couldn&#x27;t use their user profile because it was corrupted<p>- So it created a temporary profile in &quot;C:\Users\TEMP&quot;. (This wasn&#x27;t obvious to the user because Explorer hides the &#x27;detail&#x27; of the file path and simply shows the username)<p>- Unwittingly, when they moved the precious files to the &quot;correct&quot; place, they were putting them into a <i>temporary</i> profile.<p>- On shutdown, Windows promptly deleted the temporary profile, so &quot;C:\Users\TEMP&quot; got wiped along with all of the files.<p>I was frankly astonished that Windows would drop them into a temporary user profile without dire warnings about its transience. Anyway, now I have to try to recover not only the files, but the directory structures. I&#x27;m not even sure it&#x27;s possible... :(
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