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A few weeks ago I noticed that these folders that had over a decade's worth of media stored in them were completely empty. Totally emptied out. And those were the only folders this happened to (that I noticed). This happened about a week after I installed the Kaspersky Total Security trial software that I'm still using. It's also around the time I installed Android Studio, however, I got both from their legitimate websites. Other software I have installed over the past 2 months - VyprVPN and CrashPlan for small business, Ccleaner, and a few games off Origin.com (Sim City and Sims games). I was always careful to download from the legitimate source.
I have a strong password on my login screen and these folders are secured under my personal Users folder, so I don't think it was anyone at home. I have run other virus scanners to see if I have a trojan but come up with nothing. Fortunately, I had made a local backup a week before and restored everything. Then it happened again 2 days ago, the exact same folders emptied out. It occurred to me that maybe my new SSD was corrupted, but then surely the files and folders that disappear would be more random, whereas these are very specific to media files under my account name.
Does anyone have any idea what's causing this and how to stop it from happening again?
Ms. WAKAME
Posted 2018-03-16T17:31:16.940
Reputation: 9
If you visit C:\Users do you see more than one folder with variations of your username? Is there perhaps a corruption issue in your original profile that caused Windows to create a new temporary profile directory? – music2myear – 2018-03-16T17:33:35.000
@music2myear I just checked - no, I'm the only profile along with Public, Default etc. – Ms. WAKAME – 2018-03-16T17:35:18.300
First of all, welcome to Super User! It sounds like you have installed several different applications recently, so that makes it a bit more difficult to narrow down the root cause of the problem. If you don't mind me asking, why did you install CCleaner? They had a rather high-profile security incident last year and quite frankly, in the wrong hands that application can do more harm than good. Personally, if I did utilize CCleaner I would never actually install it, simply utilizing the portable version. – Run5k – 2018-03-16T17:59:38.460