I've run into some problems. I believe IE got hacked somehow, from where I currently do not know. Running low on disk space (2 HDDs 300+500 GB) I did some general cleaning and just came across a shortcut in 'IE favorites' to the 'User/Films' directory, so I removed it. I mean, it shouldn't be there, no other user folder is in IE shortcuts and I've never seen it in there before so why should it be there? The fact that it took several seconds to remove it made me suspicious and I cancelled the deletion, so it remained and I moved on to other stuff and didn't think more of it.
The next evening after work, I found files were missing... movie files, of my daughter, vacations etc. All of my films were gone. Not just the films the whole folder was gone! How!? I did not delete it I'm not that stupid! WTF!!!
So now I'm sitting on a HDD with about 50 GB of missing video files. Need to send it to data recovery, it should be fairly easy to restore but some of it will undoubtedly be gone forever. At the same time, I'm wondering if they'll find a virus or something on it because this is a complete mystery to me. I have not approved the deletion of the film folder. Being the only one using this PC there is no way someone else could have tampered with it.
Getting a 1.5 TB HDD after this weekend and will make a fresh install on it while trying to salvage what can possibly be saved from the old disk.
I'm guessing that what I thought was a shortcut to the 'Films' folder was in fact actually the folder itself. How and why it would be in IE shortcuts root (the star in upper left IE window) is beyond me. Even if this actually was the folder I did not confirm the removal of it but cancelled it. The folder and files were there after cancellation, but not the next day with at least one reboot in between.
Anyone know what might be the cause of this???
