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Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 5:27 pm

Warning, yet another Microsoft rant ahead...

WHY does Microsoft need to try and control *everything* on your computer? I've always been leery of the "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Music", etc folders. Why should the operating system try to tell me how to store my files? In most cases I have ignored this. For example, I put all of my MP3 files in a common shared disk rather than using "My Music".

Why am I complaining about this? Well, remember a couple of weeks ago when I mentioned that my gaming system crashed because of a memory failure. And remember that when I first ran the Windows Recovery, it crashed too?

Well, in the process of reinstalling Windows, Windows decided to DELETE ALL OF MY PICTURES! Yes, I was still using the "My Pictures" folder to store ALL of my pictures from my digital camera from the last FIVE years. Because the camera software defaulted to storing them in this directory and I never thought to change it.

When you reinstall Windows, your My Pictures folder gets overwritten with the stupid sample pictures that come with Windows. And everything else is GONE! Since this happens apparently near the beginning of the reinstall, the process of installing Windows and then installing all of the patches like SP2 end up overwriting lots of disk space.

I found a great data recovery program called "Recover My Files" that does a nice job of searching for all deleted files and letting you preview image files before recovering them. Out of about 1,000 pictures I was able to recover about 10.

Fortunately I found an old backup on Chiara's computers that has about 80% of the pictures. But pictures from the last 2 years are gone gone gone.

So, take my advice and NEVER NEVER store ANYTHING in any folder called "My something", like "My Pictures". You are just asking for trouble down the line. Store your files in your own directory names so that Windows doesn't know about them and can't do anything with them.

And yes, My Documents was also cleared out. Fortunately I didn't have anything important in there (that I remember) since this is my gaming computer. My Music also got cleared out, so if I used the defaults for my media player and for ITunes, I would have just lost all of the music that I have paid for. As I said, fortunately I had stored all my music elsewhere.

I'm sure this is also related to losing most of the entries in my Start/Programs menu after the reinstall.

Yep, as people have mentioned before, it's time to buy new disks and start some backup systems. But I wanted to post this to warn other people so that they don't fall into this evil Microsoft trap.

I've always HATED the way Microsoft stores data files and program settings. When I used to do sysadmin stuff I was always changing the location of things like My Documents to try and separate Data from Programs. Microsoft obviously has never understood the fundamental difference between user data and program data since it's nearly impossible to separate the two in Windows.

Days like this I yearn for the more staightforward and logical structure of *NIX where stuff in /usr was user data, and that is what needed to be backed up, while /bin had the program data and /etc had all of the configuration and preferences. And it was easy to just mount /usr on a separate disk if you wanted. Sigh...some days I can't believe we put up with this Windows crap.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

This is one I haven't ran into... it usually just leaves the old folder alone in 'Documents and Settings' and creates the new one as 'user.computername' for the new information. Was this the administrator account or just a normal user account?

(readability edit)

Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 7:30 pm

It was the admin account (renamed to a user account).

My guess is that when the Windows Setup crashed the first time (when the bad memory was still installed), it was probably in the middle of saving the current settings somewhere and got aborted in the middle. So when it went to restore those settings there wasn't anything there.

In any case, I need to give "Recover My Files" a RAVE REVIEW! I previously just ran it in "Quick Search" mode and it only recovered a handful of images. I just got done using it's advanced mode. In this case it actually scans the disk and tries to reconstruct files. It ended up recovering several *hundred* image files!!

So, between the Recovery and the backup, I probably have something like 90% of the pictures that I lost. Not too bad considering it's been more than 2 weeks since the crash and I've reinstalled Windows, all of the service packs, and a couple of other packages since then.

"Recover My Files" is the first data recovery program that I can actually say meets my high standards and is worth the money. I was *very* impressed by it's ease of use and overall functionality, especially for recovering images.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

I think it was a "feature" of the windows xp installer, win2k installer renames like slicertool said, but winxp warns in the installer "you may lose your documents/etc" .... "may" seems to mean "will" in most cases these days. I never never never never never never ever ever ever never ever ever (etc) trusted the "My Crap" folders since Win 95 introduced them, and frequent reinstalls were commonplace. One thing I forgot way too mahy times was my "desktop" folder too, so I've learned where the registry hack for that is and have it pointing to my "D" drive along with a few of the other folders. That way when I format my C drive when windows dies, I don't lose anything (except sometimes save games that I forgot to move out from their c:\program files\ directory.

Glad to hear that recovery program helped a lot tho :)