Restarted My Computer and Everything Is Gone Windows 11/10/8/7

Restarted my computer and everything is gone! If your Windows 10 causes such a huge data loss in this way, you are in the right place. Check the possible reasons and solutions on this page, and let EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard find the lost data.

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Page Table of Contents

Updated By

Brithny

Approved By

Evan Galasso

Updated on

24 July 2024

Min Reading

9 Min

It's NOT about a single file loss after restarting a computer but almost everything! People say that restarted my computer and everything is gone in Windows 10 or Windows 11, and that's really a horrible experience, especially they don't know how did this happen and where to find the disappeared files on the hard drive in Windows 10!

Workable Solutions Step-by-step Troubleshooting
Fix 1. Switch User Account If this is your case, try to log the current user account out and log in with your...Full steps
Fix 2. Get Off Data Run EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard on your PC and select the drive...Full steps
Fix 3. Run System Restore Go to "Control Panel -> System and Security -> Backup and Restore...Full steps

Some Guessings on Huge data loss After Restarting Your Computer

Above all, let's exclude the inevitable consequences of doing a Windows 10 factory restore and formatting a hard disk on purpose. There are perhaps three reasons why you lost everything for no reason after a normal computer restart.

  1. Virus infection
  2. Imminent hard drive failure
  3. Computer suffered a hard crash and couldn't load your profile on the reboot

Confirmed Solutions to "Files Missing After Restart" Issue (3 Ways)

Altogether, three viable solutions are provided here, hope at least one solution works for your case.

Solution 1: Switch the User Account

The first solution might be helpful if it's because of an unexpected computer restart for configuring Windows 10 updates or something related to a system update, it's likely that your computer suffered a hard crash and couldn't load your profile on the reboot. It probably loaded a temporary profile instead, so everything seems to be gone.

  • If this is your case, try to log out of the current user account and log in with your own account and password.
  • If logging into the user account works, the missing files, folders, and applications should reappear on your computer.

Solution 2: Get Off Data from the Hard Drive and Install a New One

Let's recall some moments. Is your system running slower and slower recently? Are programs crashing or freezing a lot while opening? If yes, it sounds more like a hardware issue than a software issue. Imminent hard drive failure is happening and that would pretty much swallow your data.

To solve the problem, you can only choose to replace the problematic hard drive before it's too late. Otherwise, more data loss will occur in the future.

Since it's already a failing hard drive, the best way to rescue data as much as possible is to copy the old hard drive to a new one, and use EaseUS EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard to perform data recovery after hard drive replacement.

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Step 1. Scan the hard drive partition

Select the drive on your hard disk where you lost or deleted files. Click "Search for Lost Data" and let EaseUS data recovery software scan for all lost data and files on the selected drive.

select a location and scan hard drive

Step 2. Check the results

When the scan completes, you can apply the "Filter" feature or click the "Search files or folders" option to find the lost files on the hard drive.

Find and preview all lost hard drive data

Step 3. Restore lost hard drive data

Select wanted files that you lost on the drive and click "Recover" to save them to another location.

💡Tip: You can restore data on the local disks, external hard drives, and also the cloud storage.

Restore lost hard drive data.

You can also check our video tutorial about hard drive recovery:

  • To copy data from a hard drive to a new one, you can ask this sector by sector recovery tool for help.
  • To recover data on a new hard drive, run EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard and take the three steps.

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Solution 3: Perform a System Restore

If you feel uncertain about the real causes of this data loss disaster, perhaps doing a system restore could save you from the frustrating moment.

Warning
Restoring the system to an earlier state could certainly restore all the missing data and applications, however, the latter saved data after this restore point would be erased. You can still undo the system restore.

This is how you do a system restore to a time before you had this problem:

"Control Panel -> System and Security -> Backup and Restore -> Restore files from backup"

Bonus Tip - Back Up Your Data to Avoid Data Loss

At this point, people would realize the importance of a backup. Yes, it's better late than never. Here, my suggestion is backing up data to external devices or cloud storage like (Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox).

To create a backup for your files, you need backup and restore software. I recommend EaseUS free backup software. It's free software to back up and restore files and systems. It supports all the basic backup solutions, including file backup, partition backup, system backup, and disk backup. 

It's still disk cloning software, which allows you to clone a system, disk, or partition. After that, you can directly use the cloned disk to replace the disk having problems.

Follow the details to back up files to an external hard drive:

Step 1. To begin the backup process, click the Select backup contents button.

create file backup step1

Step 2. Four data backup categories are listed: File, Disk, OS, and Mail.

create file backup step2

Step 3. Lists of both local and network files are shown on the left-hand side of the screen. Expanding the directory so that you can choose the files to back up.

File backup

Step 4. Follow the guidance on the screen and choose the place where you want to store the back up.

File backup step4

Make sure that the backup is encrypted and set the backup schedule by clicking Options in Backup Options. You can also choose to start the backup at a certain time in Backup Scheme by clicking Options. There are many other customizable options that you can look into.

Backup options

Step 5. You can store the backup file either on your computer, in EaseUS's cloud service, or on a network-attached storage device (NAS).

file backup step4

Step 6. EaseUS Todo Backup enables customers store backup copies of their files on a third-party cloud drive or on the company's own cloud storage.

If you want to back up your data on a third-party cloud drive, select Local Drive and scroll down to add Cloud Device. Then fill in your account information.

Backup to cloud

Click EaseUS Cloud, then sign up and log in with your EaseUS account if you wish to store backup files to EaseUS' own cloud storage service.

backup to easeus cloud

Step 7. Click on Backup Now to start a backup.  When the backup process is done, it will display as a card on the left-hand side of the screen. A right-click will let you see more about how to handle the backup job in more depth.

File backup step7

  • Updated by

    Brithny is a technology enthusiast, aiming to make readers' tech lives easy and enjoyable. She loves exploring new technologies and writing technical how-to tips. In her spare time, she loves sharing things about her game experience on Facebook or Twitter.…
  • Approved by

    Evan Galasso is a digital forensics and data recovery engineer with over 10 years of experience in the field. He presents opinions on the current state of storage media, reverse engineering of storage systems and firmware, and electro-mechanical systems of SSDs and HDDs.…
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