MyDocuments Go Boom?

September 21, 2006 5:28 PM

[FirefoxProfileFilter]: My brother just inadvertently deleted everything in his My Documents folder when he deleted a Firefox Profile. Lil' help?

(windows XP, latest version of Firefox)

My brother created another profile on Firefox. Big deal, right?

He deleted said profile immediately afterward for some reason. Big deal, right?

Wrong. He found out that when he deleted the profile, it deleted EVERYTHING in his My Documents. We're talking 20 gigs of pics, documents, music, videos... all gone. It deleted in 2 seconds, and the contents aren't in his Recycle Bin. The "Undo Action" option is greyed out in the window as well.

I think he just had a heart attack.

So.... mefites... know of any way he can get all that stuff back?

posted by damnjezebel to Technology (7 answers total)

If possible, shut down the computer immediately, and don't start up again from the hard drive. You'll want to boot from a CD in order to try an undelete or data-recovery program.
posted by mbrubeck at 5:57 PM on September 21, 2006

There is a freeware program called Restoration that can restore deleted files, assuming that's the problem.
posted by camcgee at 6:20 PM on September 21, 2006

I had almost the same thing happen last week, although in my case it deleted things I had (stupidly) stored on the desktop. (I had stored the profile on the desktop as well.)

I wasn't able to find any easy fixes. Someone suggested I ask in the Firefox Support forum here . (I didn't end up asking because I decided the stuff I'd lost wasn't worth the effort.)
posted by needs more cowbell at 6:24 PM on September 21, 2006

Ignore my previous comment -- I just did a test with what I presume was the scenario and Restoration found nothing.
posted by camcgee at 6:34 PM on September 21, 2006

From the MozillaZine Knowledge Base (emphasis added):

Deleting a Firefox or Thunderbird profile

Warning: It is possible that a Firefox or Thunderbird profile folder may contain non-Mozilla files if you selected a "custom" profile location when the profile was created (see above). If you later use the "Delete Files" option to remove that profile, the entire folder and it's contents will be deleted, including any non-Mozilla files. This cannot be undone. For this reason, it is recommended that you avoid using the "Delete Files" option when deleting a Firefox or Thunderbird profile . If you want to delete the profile folder also, you can do that manually.

posted by camcgee at 12:23 AM on September 22, 2006

Whoa. That's some dreadful coding.
posted by blag at 5:01 AM on September 22, 2006

Sounds like he deleted his windows profile (all the stuff under documents and settins/username) not just his firefox profile. Unless he changed all the defaults to point to My Documents which is highly unlikely and I think impossilbe during install-time.

Try Freeundelete. Install it to a flash disk not the C drive. Anything he's written to the C drive is most likely overwriting his deleted stuff.
posted by damn dirty ape at 6:41 AM on September 22, 2006