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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.