Navigating Partial Data Loss: A Cautionary Tale

Hello Readers,

Today, I want to share a recent experience I faced with my work computer, which serves as a reminder of the unpredictable nature of technology. This past Friday, I began encountering significant performance issues with my Windows 10 PC. It was lagging and responding more slowly than usual, prompting me to initiate a reboot. To my surprise, the boot process took an unusually long time, about 15-20 minutes. This raised my alarm, as such occurrences had never happened before.

Once the system finally started, I logged into my account, only to be greeted by an unsettling black screen that flickered on and off. An error message appeared, but I was unable to access any applications, although I could open Task Manager.

Frustrated, I decided to restart the computer, but the same issue repeated itself. Seeking assistance, I reached out to the IT department. A technician arrived and assured me that it wasn’t a serious matter. He attempted to run the explorer.exe command using Task Manager, but was met with an error. Undeterred, he logged in as an administrator and found no issues in his session.

He proceeded to open the Command Prompt and executed a scan that lasted around five minutes, during which it claimed to have repaired corrupted files. Feeling optimistic, he rebooted the system, but unfortunately, I was still faced with the same frustrating problem upon trying to log back in.

At that point, the technician decided to take my PC for further investigation. He successfully backed up all my data onto an external drive, reformatted the hard drive, and installed Windows 11 before restoring my files from the backup.

However, upon reviewing the restored data, I discovered that several important folders and files were inexplicably missing. It appeared that they might have been deleted prior to the backup, or perhaps there was an issue during the copy process. The technician suggested that it could have been caused by a virus, but he wasn’t entirely certain about that either.

This entire situation has been quite disheartening, as the loss of files is never an easy thing to swallow. I’m reaching out to see if anyone else has experienced something similar. How do you handle unexpected data losses?

Thank you for taking the time to read my story. Your insights and experiences would be greatly appreciated!