Hi all

This is a weird query and having googled it, I can find similar situations but not one the same so hoping someone on here might help. I have a 1000gb external HDD, which I took to my sisters as I had some of her documents on it. Bringing it back to my PC though, my documents on aren’t visible anymore. Initially I thought that they got mistakenly deleted while at my sisters, however if I go into the properties, it shows as 900gb full, but if I select all folders/files on the drive it only totals ~500gb. So where is the 400gb (which is about he size of my documents.) As I know the name of some of the files, I tried searching for them but no results came up. I am wondering whether it might be worth getting a data retrieval / restorer programme, but I don’t know whether that will get it all back.

Thanks for any help anyone might give.

Well, if they use up space on the HD, I guess they're not deleted. Have you checked they haven't been hidden for some reason (Folder Options)?

I have tried everything I can think of to find them, going into folder optioins and setting everything to visible. It is like they are hidden though, I just don't know how they got that way.

You could try attrib /s /d -s -h * at the drive's root from the command line, but that's pretty much the same thing as going thru folder options. Other than that, I can only think of taking ownership of everything on the drive, if it's NTFS.

well, my 1TB Seagate is incontinent too, it randomly forgets where it saved its files. I get them back by using a option in the drives options. I made a pic

I use the option above Defragmentation, and check the upper check box in the next window. Leave the second unchecked, or it will perform a scan that takes ~24 hours.