How to find a folder you've 'misplaced'

Factual Questions
1

TLDR version: what is a good program that will find ‘missing’ files/folders for me? As in, I can give the program the name/partial name of a file or folder, and assuming it still exists on my hard drive, the program will ferret it out and tell me where it is currently hiding?

I’m recovering from a panic attack here.

You see, I had a folder (C:\Information) which I’ve had since I first had a computer with a C: drive. (Yes, pretty useless name, but habit.) I keep all sorts of stuff in there, the currently relevant one being a subfolder called Taxes, which then contains folders for each year.

Today I went to stuff some 1099 .pdf files into C:\Information\Taxes\2017 … and discovered it no longer existed. Urk?

Not only was the “2017” folder missing, so was “Taxes”, and in fact, so was the ENTIRE FREAKING “INFORMATION” folder. All my tax info, all my financial records, all my medical records… basically my life and history had vanished. :frowning:

Remembering that I have in the past managed to misfile stuff, I tried using the Win7 built in search to find my files. Found lots of files with ‘tax’ and ‘taxes’ and ‘information’ and so forth in their titles or contents, but none of them were what I was looking for. :frowning:

At which point I realized that even though I supposedly have everything backed up – to a website AND to a separate hard drive here – I have NEVER retrieved a file from either and have no real reason to believe it’s possible to do so. (I bet this is not how sensible computer people do things. This is, buy some software, tell it to run, and go skipping off merrily in the naïve assumption that everything actually works somehow with no further input/understanding from me needed.) Never mind that for now.

I refused to believe such a huge and vital chunk of my data could simply vanish I kept looking. Literally by clicking my way through the entire file tree, each folder, each subfolder… and thankfully I found my “Information” folder, apparently intact, where it was hiding two levels under C:\My Library. How it got there… well, obviously operator malfunction, but I would have sworn I haven’t had any interaction with “My Library” for months so how I could have done it, beats me.

So: whew! I was able to drag it back up to where it belonged, all is fine (fingers crossed) but I don’t want to experience this panic ever again.

Three step plan:

  1. get a good “search my disk” program
  2. find out how to get files back from the online place
  3. buy another hard drive (my current one is dangerously full anyway) and backup program (recommendations?) and do a fresh backup of my whole disk and RTFM on how to restore a file from that backup AND actually do it!
2

  1. Always, always state the OS you’re using. Don’t leave it to people trying to help you suss out that “C:” probably means you’re using some form of MS Windows!

  2. Use Ultrasearch. It’ll handle partial file/folder names no prob.

3

I’ve been using the Agent Ransack search tool for years.

https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/

4

https://www.voidtools.com/

They have a free program called Everything that indexes all your folder and file names and can work with partials. I love it.

5

I’m guessing Windows 7.

6

I would second Everything, found at Downloads - voidtools - if you know a partial name of a folder or document, it’ll find it.

7

I also use Everything. I find I use it a lot. I like it. I think its better than Windows Search.

8

Thank you all! I downloaded all three (since they’re all free, why not?) and started by installing Everything since it got the most votes.

Let me tell you, that sucker is faaaaast! It indexed four drives in less than 10 seconds. And when I typed in “tax” it turned up all the files I was looking for, on both my main drive and the backup drive so fast, plus a couple dozen others, so fast I hadn’t even looked at the clock before they were all displayed!

I’ll hold onto the other two programs in case some major flaw shows up, but it sure looks like it’ll do what I need. :slight_smile:

9

I’m curious, where did your files go and how do you think they moved from where you thought they were supposed to be?

10

I’m not sure why the need for a third-party search program.

The main thing that will determine whether or not Search works in Windows is whether the folder you want to search is being indexed. In my experience, if a folder and all its sub-folders are indexed, then it is generally incredibly fast to find whatever you need.

11

With the virtually unlimited amounts you can find online, I’m surprised people still keep porn buried on their local computer.

Yes, joke, but as I read this, that’s how it sounded in my head. Remember the good old days of C:\stuff\documents axes axes axes axes\1998\documents\oldstuff,…

12

Something similar happened to me once. I think I was using one of the standard “finder” windows (e.g., what comes up when you click “Save as”), and my hand jittered when I pressed the mouse button on the relevant folder. The jitter causes that folder to be moved to the jittered-to folder.

(Do I think that Windo$e’s making the “Save As” window a “Save as … and Rearrange folders if my Hand Jitters” window is an admirable design idea? Open a Pit thread to find out!)

I use the find command of cygwin to locate forgotten or misplaced files or folders. Downloading cygwin is a bit tedious, but I might do it even if I intended it only for housekeeping chores like OP’s!

13

Except “documents” wouldn’t be allowed because of the eight character limit.

14

Just an idea…if the folder you frequently use isn’t there anymore, and you are very sure you have the correct path and spelling, I’d run a chkdsk on the entire drive. If something happened to the directory structure, major blocks of data could be, not “gone,” but unlinked. If you are lucky, the links can be fixed and the data magically will appear.

Also make sure the “show hidden files” option is on. Maybe your missing folders have accidentally been flagged as hidden.

I am often called upon to find files/folders that some computer user insists aren’t there anymore. Typically, I find that they have multiple “mydocuments” folders all over the drive, and since the Windows default is to NOT display a full path, it’s not readily obvious. Try turning on the “show full path” feature in folder options and you might be surprised what you learn.

15

I did a search for “Windows”. :smack:

16

Windows indexing. shudder

17

I thought I said. A huge branch of my files was moved so instead of being C:\Information(hundreds of subfolders/files) they were moved to being C:\My Library\FromDell\Mysteries\Information(hundreds of subfolders/files).

As to how, I’d love to blame it on someone else (hubby? some Evil Corporate Spy?) or some buggy program or a glitch in the time/space Web of the Universe, but the dismal truth I’m sure is that I accidentally told the computer to move it there. :frowning:

You see, I am one of those “out of sight, out of mind” type people, in the Virtual World as much as real life. For example, if a bill comes in the paper mail, I put it on top of the ‘household’ desk right in view, rather than neatly in a ‘bill to pay’ folder or ‘incoming tray’ or whatever more normal people do. If I didn’t see the bill regularly as I walk past that desk, I would most likely never remember to sit down and take care of it.

This makes for a house with little designated piles in many spots for various types of things, but mostly insures stuff actually gets dealt with on time instead of me always paying late fees or offending Aunt Gina by not sending her a birthday card at the right time or that donation for Goodwill being left to moulder away forever in the back of some closet.

The computer equivalent of this is that EVERYTHING I download goes onto the desktop. The digital library book, that recipe Joan sent me, that new program, those pictures, the interesting article I don’t have time to read right then … everything. And, obviously, my screen becomes a useless clog of clutter until I am ‘forced’ into a housekeeping spree, when I actually do what I should have done at the time. As in, read the articles, admire the pictures, move the library books to my kindle, put that chunk of data I might possibly need again into the proper storage file

But when you, well, I am plowing through dozens of files, making decisions, dragging and dropping things where I want them…it’s boring. And my mind can stop paying complete attention and if your finger accidentally stops pressingthe mouse button a bit too soon and you don’t notice at the time… Bam! Files ‘mysteriously’ moved to places all by themselves. :smack:

How I could have accidentally grabbed onto the “Information” folder I don’t know. I certainly would never have moved it deliberately, but in all probability it was a screw up by me.

Uh. Well, given that I have no idea how the computer decides what to index… Am I supposed to have told it which folders to do? All I know is that I can click on start, start typing the name of a program or a file and hit return, and normally it comes up with a list that includes what I what. (Magic!) But this time, it utterly failed me. So I guess that means it wasn’t indexing those files.

Heh. No, sorry. Genuine boring tax forms.

Both of these sound like really good advice, thank you!

See, I’m not the only one these things happen to! Computers do exactly what you tell them to, it’s just you don’t always know what you’ve told the computer to do.

18

I’ve had this happen when I’m just moving the mouse across the screen and accidentally momentarily press a mouse button. This grabs whatever was under the cursor when I click and drops it wherever the cursor was when I release. I almost always notice when I’ve done this (although it’s not always easy to figure out what got moved and where it now is), but it would certainly be possible to do it without noticing.

19

We get crap like this on the shared folders at work. Always an adventure to see why my file or folder shortcuts stop working.

20

I’m willing to accept that there might be some less-than-optimal stuff going on in the way that Windows indexes files and folders, but for me, the main question to answer is: Does it find what i need it to find, quickly and easily? And the answer, at least since Windows 7, has always been “Yes.”

Before Win 7, i used to run third-party index-and-search apps because Windows search function was so shitty. When i got Win 7, however, the speed and functionality of the search function was vastly improved. At the time, i installed a couple of third-party programs and then ran some searches, both for file names and for content within files, and in every case Windows search got me what i needed just as quickly and just as efficiently as the third-party apps. Similarly, in Win 10 i’ve never had a problem finding what i need.

Sure, because the only thing that Everything indexes is your file and folder names. If the only thing indexed by Windows Search, or by any other third-party search app, were file and folder names, they would be able to build their indexes in a few seconds too. But most decent indexing programs index the contents as well, because they recognize that we might want to search our content for topics that don’t necessarily appear in file and folder names.

If all you need is file or folder names, though, a program like Everything is great.

Windows indexes certain folders, and certain types of folders, by default. It will index anything in your Libraries, and in your email, i believe, as well as a few other things.

You can add and remove folders and drives from the indexing list by going to the Indexing Options selection in Control Panel (that’s what it’s called in Win 10; i’m pretty sure it was the same in Win 7). There, you can see what drives and folders are already being indexed, and you can make changes depending on what you want to be able to search.