Sometimes whole folders or files seem to disappear from a Windows computer. Here’s how to find them again including places that Windows doesn’t normally check.
Open Explorer and look for the “This PC” label that’s lower down the left-side menu, or type “This PC” in the address bar.
This PC means all the indexed locations on the computer which includes any drives and usually OneDrive and other cloud storage. Microsoft calls this a ‘slow in-depth’ search.
You could also search from “Home” (top-left of the navigation list) which searches what Microsoft calls “relevant files and the cloud”.
Search the whole computer
From the “Search This PC” box (top-right), look for the name of a folder or file that’s in the missing folders. That can be anything and does not have to be an exact file name – just a word or two.
That will present a list of results that match, folders or files. This result is a folder.
But where is that folder? Which drive or sub-folder is it in? Right-click on a folder or file in the search results and choose “Open folder location” That will open an Explorer window for that folder where you can see its location on the computer and other files in the same folder.
Each search may take a little time, depending on the number of files on the computer.
Better searches
Search only folder names is faster and drops any matching file names.
Search for “ kind:folder “ followed by a search term, for example “ kind:folder recipe “ will only find folder names that include the word “recipe”.
Some other Kind: options are
kind:picture – for images including JPG and PNG
kind:document – Word documents and PDF
kind:music – audio files
Or search by file extension e.g *.docx will find any Word documents.
Search options
By default, Windows searches only file and folder names but under Search options, you can choose to look inside:
- File contents (like Word documents)
- Zipped (ZIP) files
Adding these options makes for a slower but more comprehensive search.
As you can see there are also options to limit results to files of a certain age, type or size.
Really search whole computer
Microsoft misleads their customers because searches using “This PC” and “Home” don’t really check all folders on connected drives. That’s because Windows indexes the folders where files should be and only searches those folders.
In most cases, that’s enough. Indexing and limiting searches makes searches a lot faster. But sometimes that’s not enough and you need to check everywhere.
To do that, go to Settings | Privacy & security | Searching Windows.
Switch from Classic to Enhanced which will search the whole computer after a new index is created.
Even then, some folders are excluded and it’s possible those automatically omitted folders have what you need. So consider removing some or all the excluded folders.
If you want a slow and comprehensive search of an entire drive without indexing, a third-party tool is necessary. For many years we’ve used Treesize from JAM software. Among its many virtues is a good and easy to understand Custom Search. In this example checking multiple drives for any file or folder with the word “recipe’ in it.
OneDrive and other cloud storage
A “This PC” or “Home” search will likely include some files that are in cloud storage like OneDrive.
Many cloud stored files have a synchronized copy on the computer which should be seen by a “This PC” search. Other cloud files might have a placeholder on the computer with just the file name (that’s one reason why it’s better to search for file names, not content).
A lot depends on how the OneDrive or other service is setup on your computer. You might need to search the cloud storage separately via the web site, e.g. https://onedrive.live.com/ .
Deleted Files
We’ve assumed files or folders haven’t been deleted. Right-click on the Recycle Bin icon (on the desktop) and choose “Open” to view and recover recently deleted files.
If you have Windows File History running (a very good idea) then it should have a copy of missing files or earlier versions of files.
