Windows 10 & Missing Desktop Icons

- Windows 10 Pro, 64 bit

I was repairing, uninstalling, and installing an app yesterday. In the process, I somehow managed to delete many, but not all, of my desktop icons. My guess is that I lost about 60 to 75 percent of my prior desktop icons.

My desktop icons are just shortcuts to various programs. Although I don't have a complete inventory of my prior desktop icons, I noticed that various Adobe apps (cloud, and various apps such as Lightroom, Acrobat, and others), Acronis Backup, Powershell, Intel SSD Toolbox, CCleaner and so on went missing.

I checked my Recycle Bin and there was nothing there.

This morning, I thought that I would simply reach into my Acronis Backup to the Desktop folder, and retrieve my missing shortcuts. When I went to the Desktop folder, the only shortcuts that were present were the ones that survived yesterday's purge. My prior shortcuts that went missing were still missing.

While I was trying to understand what took place, I upgraded my Acronis Backup from 12.0 to 12.5. In the process, Acronis Backup created a desktop icon. I looked at my current Desktop folder, and there is *no* Acronis Backup shortcut file listed. So that leads me to my questions:

Question One: Why do some shortcuts have files in the Desktop folder, while other shortcuts do not?

Question Two: Is there any way to save or protect one's desktop?

Here's the path to my desktop folder:
C:\Users\UserName\Desktop

On the positive side, my desktop is cleaner now.

I'd appreciate input on my two prior questions.

@Caledon Ken,

That's really interesting.

I looked at my existing location:

C:\Users\Public\Desktop

It's almost empty with the exception of the program that I added yesterday (one I struggled with), Intel SSD Toolbox, which I added later on my own, and Acronis, which I just installed the latest version.

Then, I went back to my Acronis Backup file to the same location. Boom, all the files are there, just as you suggested that they might be.

So, somehow all those files got deleted. I'll bet dollars to donuts that somehow my repairing, uninstalling, and installing somehow triggered a massive deleting of this public folder, even though it should have been fine.

I suppose now I can just put them back and sort them out on my desktop.

One remaining set of questions: In my backup public/desktop, I see a file "desktop.ini". What is that file? Do I need to do anything with it?

@dalchina Thank you for your comments. I expect that desktop.ini is a file that contains the order of the shortcuts that appear on the desktop or something similar.

I do backup my computer, although not as frequently as I should. I do, however, have all my shortcuts now. And now that I know where to look for my shortcuts, it's easy peasy to retrieve them again. I have three physical drives, one SSD for my operating system and app, and two traditional drives. I back up my C drive (SSD) to one of my traditional drives. It's quick. Starting from scratch, it's less than ten minutes. If it's an incremental backup, it's about three minutes. Retrieving data is also about three minutes.

My desktop is reasonably clean. There's no data, just shortcuts to various programs. I that I have located all my shortcuts in my user/desktop and public/desktop folders, I will go through and decide which I want to remain on my desktop, and which are rarely used and need not be on the desktop.

I have my most common apps anchored on my taskbar. For others, I just use Cortana (or whatever it is called "Type to search here") for the app.

Thank you for your help.

@dalchina, thank you for the information on desktop.ini.

Regarding backups, my most critical data is in the cloud. Soon I will be moving almost everything to the cloud. The only remaining items will be my operating system and software. I can always reinstall those. And the cloud has a 30-day-rollback capability, so I should be good. Thank you for your help.

One can never be too safe. But at least I do have backups of my data. And I do virus scans on a regular basis, so I don't believe that there is anything lurking on my computer at present.