My dad was moving two folders with important files to a USB drive. He cut the folders and pasted them to the USB, when he tried to access the files in one of the folders on another computer, he realized that the directory was empty, while the other had no problems. Does anyone know what happened and how to fix it?
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A plausible cause: the device was unplugged too soon or "safely remove hardware" was required but not used. See What is the rationale behind safely removing USB media from windows PCs? and similar questions.
Please read How do I recover lost/inaccessible data from my storage device? Especially answers that mention photorec, foremost.
There are also tools specific to the filesystem (e.g. ntfsundelete).
You can try to recover data from the USB drive. Note it's possible the missing data never got to the USB drive. You will maximize your chances if you try to recover data from the source device as well (or rather: primarily). We know the data was there, maybe it has not been overwritten yet.
The important thing is to STOP using the device(s) you want to recover data from. Any type of I/O can ruin your chances of a recovery.
Kamil Maciorowski
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