A computer glitch question

[Mark_Henderson]

I know this is a football forum, not a tech. support site, but a few times in the past, I've gotten some quick, helpful solutions in here from people who were more knowledgeable than me (practically everybody).

I've had a strange glitch on my laptop. The other day, Excel stopped working and I subscribe monthly to Office 365 for it (stupid, I should have just bought the programs). A tech support guy in India proxied into my PC and got it to work again. Also, yesterday I downloaded a subscription for Acrobat because I need it for an annual report I'm doing for work.

Now, I've noticed that somehow there's a shitload of files (5,922) in my Recycle Bin. There's all kinds of folders and temp files and old documents and possibly documents that I want and I'm sure what most of the stuff is.

Has this glitch happened to anyone else? I could restore to an earlier date, but I'm working on a big project and don't want to lose work that I've done. Now I can't find an Excel report that I know I had saved, but it doesn't seem to be in with the mass of stuff in the Recycle Bin.

I don't know if this could be a virus, or caused by something that the Microsoft Tech guy did, or from downloading Acrobat, but the problem just happened in the last couple days.

Any thoughts, other than me being a PITA for asking this stuff here?

 

[BostonTim]

I know this is a football forum, not a tech. support site, but a few times in the past, I've gotten some quick, helpful solutions in here from people who were more knowledgeable than me (practically everybody).

I've had a strange glitch on my laptop. The other day, Excel stopped working and I subscribe monthly to Office 365 for it (stupid, I should have just bought the programs). A tech support guy in India proxied into my PC and got it to work again. Also, yesterday I downloaded a subscription for Acrobat because I need it for an annual report I'm doing for work.

Now, I've noticed that somehow there's a shitload of files (5,922) in my Recycle Bin. There's all kinds of folders and temp files and old documents and possibly documents that I want and I'm sure what most of the stuff is.

Has this glitch happened to anyone else? I could restore to an earlier date, but I'm working on a big project and don't want to lose work that I've done. Now I can't find an Excel report that I know I had saved, but it doesn't seem to be in with the mass of stuff in the Recycle Bin.

I don't know if this could be a virus, or caused by something that the Microsoft Tech guy did, or from downloading Acrobat, but the problem just happened in the last couple days.

Any thoughts, other than me being a PITA for asking this stuff here?

Talk about way beyond my skill-set. ROFL

Sounds like a real bitch. Good luck is all I got.


Cheers, BostonTim

 

[Mark_Henderson]

For what it's worth, all these files were dumped in the recycle bin at 6:41 on Friday, while the Microsoft Office support guy in India was on my computer, so he did some command that did that. There's tons of .tmp file folders and license key files, which I probably don't need. But, there's also documents and lots of other things mixed in.

What I'm asking is if anyone knows if there's a way I can restore my system to what it was like before these 5,900 files got dumped in the recycle bin without losing the work that I've done over the weekend?

 

[deec77]

For what it's worth, all these files were dumped in the recycle bin at 6:41 on Friday, while the Microsoft Office support guy in India was on my computer, so he did some command that did that. There's tons of .tmp file folders and license key files, which I probably don't need. But, there's also documents and lots of other things mixed in.

What I'm asking is if anyone knows if there's a way I can restore my system to what it was like before these 5,900 files got dumped in the recycle bin without losing the work that I've done over the weekend?

Depends on your operating system and if you back up stuff. You can restore things from the trash bin too. I would restore before the previous update assuming you backed things up. I'm not a windows person but hubby is and they do have a cloud back up to a earlier date. There definitely is a way depending on your running system. Good luck wish I could be of more help.



~Dee~

 

[O_P_T]

Open the recycle bin and change the view to "details".

Sort on file type by clicking on that entry at the top of the window.

Find the file types of interest (e.g, *.xls or xlsx), highlight them and select restore. You can get that option by right clicking or changing the tab view at the top of the window.

Before you restore, you might want to make a screen capture using the Snip tool so you'll know the filenames incase they get put in a folder you didn't anticipate. If you know the file name, you can search for it.

I'd also check to see if the files are in the Microsquish cloud. I forget what they call it, but IIRC, that's the default location the 365 versions save to.

 

[O_P_T]

Forgot to mention.

System Restore won't help you. That only affects drivers, programs, Registry settings, etc.

It leaves data alone. Or at least it's supposed to.

 

[dchester]

For what it's worth, all these files were dumped in the recycle bin at 6:41 on Friday, while the Microsoft Office support guy in India was on my computer, so he did some command that did that. There's tons of .tmp file folders and license key files, which I probably don't need. But, there's also documents and lots of other things mixed in.

What I'm asking is if anyone knows if there's a way I can restore my system to what it was like before these 5,900 files got dumped in the recycle bin without losing the work that I've done over the weekend?

Do you know for a fact that you've lost work that you've lost anything that you care about? Sometimes various documents can end up in the temp folder (like when a browser decides to temporarily download something).

In any case, you can right click on files in the Recycle Bin and restore them.

 

[TipRoast]

Have you considered copying all your current work to a thumb drive, and then restoring the OS?