I feel your pain. After acquiring a rather nasty virus on my computer, my DH had to rebuild my computer and I lost several precious files, although he had backed everything up for me. I'm still working on revising my e-mail and address folders, but I do a little at a time and I'll get it back to the way I want it. That's one nice thing about living with a retired computer engineer; even when he tells me how to build a clock when I ask him what time it is. He hates that description of himself, but I feel it is accurate, as that's how his "engineer brain" functions.

So glad that our "experts" could help you. What a wonderful Board!!

Time to back up those files onto a memory stick -- just in case! Glad you were able to recover them.

Restoring likely will not bring back files...the mantra has to be BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP....at least use a memory stick to back up critical files...

I lost EVERYTHING once about 10 years ago ... never again ... I bought an external hard drive and back it up every Friday ... and when I do lots of downloads, I back it up that day ...

It's time consuming but the alternative is worse!

I'm so glad you got all your files back!

another tip
 

Another tip...now that you have discovered the Recycle Bin, check it once in a while and empty what you REALLY wanted to throw out..

Along this line, I have just had to replace my old laptop which was dead on arrival at the computer hospital. Took a week to research, to into to town to buy it, to leave it at the same hospital for a transfusion of info from the old laptop. But they were able to recover ALL my files, my desktop icons, my google bookmarks, and my favorites to the bookmark bar and set up all my accounts . Cost me a total of $96 from the first minute I walked in their door to the end; best money ever spent to relieve my stress about learning to use Windows 8.1!!
Professional gurus can be your best help and investment.

Jan in VA

Buy yourself an external storage like Passport, and save all your precious things to that.

I have an external hard drive on my main PC, it came with really easy to use software that let me set up multiple backup schedules. Some folders I back up every single night, others are backed up weekly, then everything is backed up once a month.

It works so well I bought two more, one for DH's personal computer and another for our shared "media" computer where all our photo and music files are housed.

They're gotten to be SO cheap these days, there's really no reason not to get one. The peace of mind is worth it. I think I paid about $60 for each drive, and they're each a terabyte of data. That's enough room that each drive should be able to hold about 2 million photographs!

For our photos, I'm actually contemplating buying ANOTHER drive for that PC specifically, so I can swap the two external drives monthly and keep the other one off-site (like in my desk at work). That way if we ever have a house fire, I'll have a fairly recent backup of all our photos and not have lost all those irreplaceable images of people and pets that are long gone.

I can left click on a deleted field and have the restore option. It has saved me a lot of work and frustration.

All my files and photos are saved online using Carbonite I can access them from any computer, smart phone, or tablet. When I take a picture on my phone the photo is automatically is uploaded to Google and Amazon Cloud and DropBox. I have them saved in three clouds. I don't have to do anything but take pictures and not worry.