Strange self-zeroing of Windows 10 and self-deleted Windows.old folder. Where to look for it?

Question

Windows

Good day. A couple of days ago, Windows 10 did a weird account update/zero. I was not at home, so I am telling this part of the story from the words of my wife))) And from her words, the account did not accept the login password, and even asked for a new one. The wife entered a new password in two boxes and after that she was able to log in. But in some miraculous way, the account was reset to zero. I would have thought that the wife simply created another account, giving it the same name, but only all the data from the desktop and other places was copied to the WIndows.old folder, as when installing a new OS. I didn’t figure it out for a long time (but I still couldn’t explain anything properly), but began to merge photos and videos from the old desktop to the server. Now, two days after this incident, I continued to merge data on the server. And in the process of copying, the entire Windows.old folder disappeared ... First, one of the subfolders from which I selectively dragged pictures showed that it was empty. And when I tried to open it again, I did not find this subfolder. The whole big Windows.old folder has disappeared somewhere. I tried to find it with a search engine, but found nothing. Tell me, who knows what kind of mysticism this happened? And where can I find this country folder?

Answer 1

A couple of days ago, Windows 10 did a weird update/reset

Dozens have their own "jokes" with resets, however, unfortunately, I still can't find free time to study them in detail. At the same time, a couple of days seem like an unusually short time for everything to be deleted, and not the worst in terms of chances for data recovery. There is a good chance that the lost files did not have time to overwrite completely, especially since you quickly noticed the loss.
Right now, the best plan seems to be:

1. Stop using the computer on which the files were deleted and remove the hard drive from it;
   
2. Connect this drive to another Windows computer;
   
3. Download the free R.saver and extract it to another disk in the system;
   
4. Do a full scan of the disk where the deleted files are located.

Copy everything you can find to the maximum, and then continue to figure it out.
Alternatively, if you really want to figure out what happened right now, instead of scanning with R.saver, make a full sector-by-sector uncompressed image of the disk so that you can work with it later.

Answer 2

Ask your wife and ask
This is not a battle of psychics
Restore any file recovery utility to another disk

Answer 3

Nowhere apparently.
If the data is valuable, there should be a backup.
Yes, and they pull out the data carefully - and certainly do not boot the system from the disk on which this data is stored.
What was hard to say.

Answer 4

Usually WIndows.old is created when installing the system "on top", those. perhaps you had an old version of dozens and it automatically updated itself to the new version. But the folder should not have disappeared on its own, perhaps instead of copying you used moving? In any case, you can try to restore it (unless it's an SSD) by booting from a live image and restoring the data to another medium.