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Got an interesting case here. I found my computer rebooted when I came home today. Windows 7 deleted everything from 2011.08.22 until today. See http://blog.tedd.no/2011/11/24/windows-7-deleted-my-files/ for details (just have a look at the picture, no need to read all).

Short story: Computer in use every day for specific purpose (test-running code builds), pretty plain Windows installation ... Suddenly disk has reverted back a few months.

Any good idea where I can look for evidence of what happened?
Any good idea of what happened? (Some automatic feature involving Shadow Copy?)

I can't find any relevant info when Googling it.

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have you reviewed your system log for clues? – uSlackr Nov 25 '11 at 1:38
Yes, as you can see in the screenshot the system logs are missing for the period. I've reviewed what was before/after and there was nothing out of the ordinary. So that is my first question; where can I find evidence. – Tedd Hansen Nov 25 '11 at 9:32
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I see only two possibilities how this could happen:

  1. If you have RAID-1 (mirroring) setup: it broke in August, so you ended up with two identical disks back then, but only one (primary) was in active use. Now you're using a second (stale) copy, either because the first one went bad or for some other reason.

  2. There was a system restore point rollback. But it shouldn't affect your documents, if they were saved in the default location. E.g. if your documents were in C:\Program Files they might be deleted along with the recently installed programs.

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1. No RAID, just a SSD drive. 2. I thought so too, but searching the disk shows no files modified in the time (except files changed today). And for example files in %appdata% that I was working on yesterday were missing, even static files that I haven't written to in a long time. System Restore/Shadow Copy is the only function in Windows I know of which could even come close to doing this. – Tedd Hansen Nov 24 '11 at 19:37
This does sound like a System Restore. But there is no method(API) to programatically restore a system without user intervention. – surfasb Nov 25 '11 at 18:03
@surfasb: Restore point is created during an app install or system update, and it is rolled back if an installation fails or if you hit reset button during the install... But rollback after 3 months? Not plausible. – haimg Nov 25 '11 at 18:13
@TeddHansen: I suggest you edit your question and copy some content, including the screenshots, from your blog post. Also, I think you should mention that this is a SSD. SSDs have "funny" firmware (relocating data automatically etc.) but I don't know enough about them to know if they can cause such phenomenon. – haimg Nov 25 '11 at 18:16
Flagged as answer because in all sanity this is a good enough answer. Ended up reinstalling, never got a good explanation of what happend. – Tedd Hansen Jan 11 at 6:45
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