I hope this is the right forum for this (first visit here - recommended by a friend).
A weird thing happened the other day. I went to save something in a particular folder in My Documents (Windows XP Home, SP2) and found it was totally empty ? the folder was there, but nothing in it. In order to keep the folder at the top of the list, I named it 001_ etc. There were a few other folders beginning with nos. up to 003_ and then the rest were in ordinary alphabetical order.
But every folder (not just the contents, the whole folders) from A ? L were also missing. Obviously I looked in various places including the Recycle Bin(!) but they weren?t there. Everything from M ? Z was intact (including my photographs ? I?m doing an OU digital photo course at the moment).
Luckily I had almost everything backed up on an external hard drive so it wasn?t the problem it might have been.
I have Norton antivirus and a Firewall, and I?m on Broadband through a router connected to my pc (the laptops are secondary). I did a full scan ? no virus, no malware &c.
There seemed two possibilities ? one more likely, the other unlikely. Or maybe not so unlikely? The ?unlikely? scenario is that I was deliberately hacked into and robbed.
More likely is that I?ve been having some trouble with instability in the pc lately. I?ve recently loaded up the full Photoshop CS3 Extended with Adobe Bridge. Often the Bridge refuses to start (even tho I?ve disabled Startup Scripts since probs began ? I read somewhere on a faq to do this) ? it works more consistently than it did, but almost every time, after working on it with no problem, when I close it down, I get an Error message ? you know, Encountered a Problem, has to close, Tell Microsoft about this problem(!) ?
But another thing I?ve had to stop trying to make CDs direct from iTunes ? the pc just decides to go to sleep! (It works OK with other software.) And recently Firefox decided it couldn?t play avi and QuickTime movies, although MSIExplorer had no problem doing so (latest download of Firefox seems to have cured this). I mention this simply to indicate that there have been some problems, though never anything as drastic as the loss of many megabytes of files/folders ...
So one way and another I?ve downloaded, installed, uninstalled, Reinstalled, a lot of large programmes (my pc is over 3 years old ? an Advent) ? it?s got two hard drives, C and D. I usually keep all the Programmes, Applications &c on C, and My Documents, music files &c on D ? I try to keep a balance between the two.
What was most puzzling about all this was the * manner * of it ? i.e. why were all the files of one folder gone, leaving the empty folder itself, and yet all the other missing folders (about 8 or 10 or so) gone completely? I suppose it could have been hackers, could it? But is there a more simple (and less paranoid) explanation please?
(A friend suggested I could have deleted them by mistake, but even I couldn't do that, hmm... No, seriously, I didn't cos they'd be in the Recycle bin and they aren't.)
Many thanks in advance for any help, suggestions &c.
Brian
