Missing or disappeared files

While working on a friends laptop I stored some of her folders on my hard drive. I went to copy them back to her hard drive and got folders with empty folders inside. I had no idea why this happened, but I reasoned that maybe trying to copy 1 zipped file might work better. I highlighted her two folders (on my hard drive), right clicked, and clicked send to compressed folder. When I tried to open the zipped folder, it was full of empty folders too. Then I clicked, "undo" to get her original folders back. Now they are empty. All of her pictures are gone. I am certain the pictures were there before did anything. How can I get her pics back?

 

Wow! That's a bummer - especially when you are trying to help some one else. I had something similar happen to a friends email program once. All his contacts and old email was lost. I felt sick. Fortunately, he had a backup from about 2 months back so we got most back. I don't suppose she has any backups?

I would try Recuva from the makers of CCleaner. and or Wise Data Recovery on both your computer and her drive. Fingers crossed but no promises.

 

Bill, as a matter of fact, it was months ago when I stored her files. She told me a few days one of the kids deleted her pictures. I said bring it over because I still had her stuff. I was her backup.
Today, I saw something weird. The two folders I put on her desktop,when looking at properties, it's zero file size, zero size on disk, yet when I deleted them, it said it deleted 21 items. The other one deleted 50 items. Something is in those folders. Now what do I do to find them?

 

Folders don't take up any measureable space. Neither do empty files.

Again, all I can suggest is those two recovery programs. You could also run chkdsk /r (or Error checking) on the drive but I would try the file recovery programs first.

 

I've run SFC and CHKDSK and no problems found. I use this drive for this purpose a lot. I save data from other drives and later, copy it back. Afterward I delete the data.. The amount of stuff the recovery software finds is overwhelming. I'm looking for someone else's pictures. I don't know what they look like. I have deleted a LOT of pictures. I've had to give up on finding her pics, but I would like to know how clicking "send to compressed (zipped) folder" can remove all of the contents of folders and subfolders, but still appears to have items in it when it's deleted.