OK, this is a weird one. I have a drive with two folders in the root directory. Folder 1 is roughly 1.1TB and Folder 2 is about 500GB. Yesterday, Folder 2 vanished. It wasn't deleted or moved to a different location - it just isn't there any more. Now, total used space for that drive is still showing approximately 1.6TB, but the only folder is Folder 1 with 1.1TB showing. So, there is about 500TB of not data on the drive. Folder 2 isn't hidden - I checked for hidden files - so the data should still be there. I've tried numerous recovery apps and none of them can find anything, presumably because the files were not actually deleted. Drive health is fine, there's no encryption/permissions on there. None of this is important - the data in that folder is backed up and only maybe a couple of files are lost, but can be recreated easily. This isn't about that. It's just seriously twisting my frikkin noodle and I want to find out how it happened. Any ideas?
I am assuming that this is a windows system. If so have you tried examining the drive with another OS? This probably isn't the case but once a long time ago I accidentally renamed a folder to something windows didn't like, but still let me make the change. Following the name change the folder disappeared, but still reported the disk usage. I had to rename the folder from Linux. I don't recall what it was, but was something silly, might have been having a leading space in the name.
Try what Dr Coin says, I've accidentally renamed a folder to "." and, of course, Windows didn't like it.
If it's NTFS drive, might want to make sure hibernate and/or fast start is turned off in windows first, else ntfs-3g can be a bit iffy in reading the drive [or at least that was the case last time i had to do anything like this].
Found it - had a linux mint live distro in my desk drawer. The folder was renamed FOUND.000 and all the subfolders were in a folder name dir0000.chk. So some kind of file table corruption, I guess. The weird thing is I've seen folders named dir0000,chk in Windows before (admittedly a long time ago), after disk repairs, but windows couldn't see this one? All recovered and appear to be intact - I might just grab the few files I didn't have backed up and restore the rest from backups anyway, just in case there is some corruption. Thanks guys
