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Disappearing Files on Surface Pro 4?
I'm wracking my brain trying to figure out what's going on with a Surface Pro 4 machine running Windows 10. A user brings it to me and says he wants Webroot removed and Avast installed, which I did. He also said he was having issues with his email sending out which I couldn't reproduce and assumed he was trying to send to an invalid address since even he was no longer having a problem.
He brings it back to me almost 2 weeks later and says all of his files are missing. To clarify, he had his user account, which is a Microsoft account, someone elses user account, also a Microsoft account which he set up temporarily but admitted he no longer uses it. This other Microsoft account is still currently used by someone else on another machine. Anyhow, I look in the Users folder and see his account, the other account, and two other accounts which aren't showing up at the log-in screen, as well as four TEMP."USER".00x. The two other accounts that weren't showing up at login had lots of data which I transferred over to his current account. The TEMP accounts have nothing in them other than an empty AppData folder. After sorting everything out, he brings it back the next day and says that when he goes to open his files, like a Word document for example, it's blank. I start it in front of him and everything I had transferred is missing. The second user account he said he never used is also no longer showing up and he is now the only user showing up at the log in screen.
Other than a few software icons on the desktop, there was a empty folder labeled 'Desktop' on the desktop, an empty 'Documents' folder inside the documents folder, etc. To make things weirder, there's a My Documents folder on the desktop with 40GB of data, but the only way I can view it is by using a recovery program. Yes, I enabled hidden files and folders as well as system files. Show desktop icons is also enabled. However, none of the desktop data is there. After recovering the My Documents folder that was on the desktop to another hard drive, none of his desktop data is there. It's all gone.
If someone is still reading this, my main question is, am I losing my mind, is this a weird Windows 10 bug, or is this guy screwing up his machine and just pulling my leg? The SSD tested good. I've run chkdsk from Windows, as well as at boot up and no problems were found. System Restore and File History are also both disabled. I've checked all of the AppData folders as well as the Public folder and his missing data isn't in any of those directories.
Any help or insight would be great because I haven't got a clue what to tell this guy other than suggesting the problem is him messing with the machine. Thank you.
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