HELP!!! All music is gone!!!

Hello fellow NBRs,

Today I wanted to permanently delete a song, so I held down Shift+Delete when the song was selected. For some reason, Vista went crazy and deleted all my other music and left the one song, including protected DRM files and all my MP3s (thousands of songs). I ran a recovery program and I think I got all of them back (not sure though). Luckily (thank god I did), I backed up a few days ago before returning home from college. I don't have my backup drive with me, but I used the Vista Backup and Restore Center. Now it's my understanding that you can go in, hit restore, and select the file type that you want to restore. Is this correct? As in you can type "MP3" or "WMA" and it will show you the files to restore. I researched on the internet that checkboxes should appear next to the files to restore, but for some reason, the last time I tried to restore, there were no checkboxes and I couldn't restore from Vista (had to go in manually and use the search function in Vista to search each individual file on the drive....luckily they are stored in zip files, so Vista can still read them). Does anyone know what that problem is?

I went back to WMP 11 where I manage all my music, and of course the whole library has defaulted itself to the default settings (as in what it's like when you get a new computer with the sample music on it).

Also, a random "Music(63)" folder has been made inside my user folder. It has a regular folder icon, not one of the green special ones that Vista has. Based on the title of it, I have a feeling Vista somehow made 62 copies of the Music folder and deleted them at the same time to make this folder "63." However, this is usually not how Vista labels the copies of their folders so I don't know what's up.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

I always us an external drive portable (no power cord) 250 GB western digital ..... just in case something weird happens

 

Yeah, I have an old 80GB Western Digital, plug in the wall powered Hard Drive. Do you know the answers to the questions I posted though?

Thanks.

 

i have no idea, but i'm sure some whiz will have the answer....at least we hope

 

Has the OP run a virus scan and malware checks? That problem you mentioned is NOT normal and I've never since this before since I do use the shift+delete command when removing files from my PC.

 

A couple of weeks ago, on a different forum, I read of someone who had something similar happen to them. They were playing around listening to their music via WMP 11, something happened, and all their music was just gone.

Very scary IMO.

 

I'll try running a virus scan. But in the mean time, does anyone else have any suggestions or answers to my original questions?

Thanks.

 

Ok, so Mcaffee found no viruses, ad-aware found nothing but tracking cookies, and spybot found nothing but tracking cookies. So basically I'm clean.

Anyone have any other advice on it?