Comp moving real slow, so a friend remotely installed and ran free version of CCleaner last night on my HP 2000, Windows 8.1. We were talking and I was drinking, and she was doing the work remotely, so I didn't pay much attention to what was checked or not, but it did not take real long to do. After rebooting, there didn't seem to be much improvement in speed, if any.
This morning, I guess it was a pop-up that said something about detecting 4 something or others, I forget what, but took it to mean there was new stuff to clean, so I hit the "analyze" button. I'm guessing it ran for an hour at least, and never finished, so I hit stop. The whole process, including giving her remote access, downloading CCleaner and doing everything took nowhere near an hour.
I hit stop and saw that there were 4,551,686kb - 49000 files and other things deleted, and this obviously seemed excessive, having done practically nothing with the computer after cleaning it last night. I hit analyze again and let it run for just a few seconds, and it found more.
Then I hit clean, and afterward scrolled down to see what it deleted. Up in the right hand corner where it tells you what category you're looking at, it said Internet temporary files, but there were lots of pics, and more disturbing, lots and lots of documents I certainly want to keep. I'm no comp wiz, so could be all the docs and pics were just temporary displays of the originals, which hopefully are still elsewhere. even if so with the Inet explorer, that probably isn't true with the "recent docs" in Windows Explorer, right?
Looks like it got everything in the Internet Explorer section, and recent documents in Windows Explorer.
So, a couple of questions:
1. Need be, can I "undelete it"? I still haven't closed it out, and can view the list.
2. Since I neither checked or unchecked any boxes this morning but there was such a massive amount of stuff being deleted (and I interrupted it - no telling how much longer it would have continued), and it was still running slow last night after being cleaned, you would think that for some reason it just did not "take" last night, and was getting it all this morning, maybe, or could it have gone back to a default setting overnight, and maybe she had not checked off as many boxes as are included in default setting.
3.I could live with that scenario, if all it deleted was indeed "throwaway" stuff that somehow got missed last night, but I saw so many docs and pics on the list, so then the question becomes what stuff was indeed "throwaway" copies, and what, if any, was not, and how do I go about getting it all back?
4. It appears I did a back up to ext hard drive the day before, so that's good - I think - seems not EVERYTHING really gets backed up - like emails, maybe? So that becomes a question - if I cannot undelete from the CClean program, what, if anything, do I have to assume is lost, that is something that is not included in auto back up?