Today I had something very strange happen. I have an Access database which is split into the UI in one file and the data in the other. I had a new version of the UI, so as usual I selected the old UI and pressed Delete. All of the files in the directory, other than a "thumbs.db" file disappeared! I thought that maybe I fat-fingered it and selected all of the files, so I went to the recycle bin and the only file (from today) that was in there was the file that I had selected to delete. None of the other files were there.
I spent quite some time searching for it, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I had a backup of the database data file that was a day old, so I was able to restore it and will be able to go back and recreate the lost data from hardcopies of the transactions, so that's good.
However, I am very concerned as to what happened. I've never seen this happen in many years of Windows usage. I'm running Windows 7 and this occurred on the C drive of a system that is only 20% full. The UI and the data file are < 4 MB each. Does anyone have any ideas to what could have occurred?