Vista disk cleanup bug dumped all my docs

[soulrebeljc]

I used RegCure a few days ago, and then ran the Vista DiskCleanup (for the first time) and defrag. I looked at the options for freeing up disk space and saw over 500GB listed for "per user archived error reporting" and another error reporting, thus listing over a terabyte of space used for this. Now I consider myself to be in the category of 'really dangerous computer operators' because I don't know too terribly much about them, enough to do general troubleshooting and fixing - but occasionally I know just enough to get in real trouble. Which is what has happened here...

SO after the disk cleanup, I rebooted to find that all of my documents folders are now empty. The folders still exist but theres nothing in them. I have most of my important stuff backed up from a couple months back, but if I could retrieve that dumped data it would be most helpful.

Any ideas?

One oddity, which gives me hope for data retrieval, is that in my "recent items" option from the start menu, the documents in that list (though no longer in the My Docs folders) are still available...

Thanks

[allibear]

Sorry I don't have a clue what's gone on there and can offer no advice on how to retrieve those files in your My Documents folder, (I don't think a system restore would do the trick in that scenario). When something like this happened to me Vista just fell apart and I had to reinstall, (has happened twice). You may find this thread of interest.

http://www.pctools.com/forum/showthread.php?t=49377

Can you actually open the file if you click on it in the 'recent items' list? If you can, once opened you could resave it back to your My Documents location, that would put some thing back there. Sorry that's a bit pathetic but all I can come up with off the top of my head :(

I don't use any registry cleaners on Vista at all now and I have unchecked the boxes in the Disk Clean Up Utility relating to error reporting. I clear my error reporting history from within 'Problem Reports and Solutions' in the Control Panel from time to time and this clears all those files that build up, rather than doing it from within the Disk Cleanup Utility, and so far I haven't had this issue reoccur.