'My Documents' contents missing after logging into domain

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.security (More info?)

I don't know exactly what happened but best practice is to copy files to a
profile - not move. Your situation is exactly why backups must be done. Hard
drives do crash and data can become corrupted. With the advent of affordable
DVD burners it is easy and inexpensive to backup large amounts of data. It
is very possible however that much of the data can be recovered if you act
quickly and depending on how much activity has occurred on that computer and
how much free disk space there is. There are data recovery tools - even free
ones that work very well. Windows does not actually delete the data. It just
removes reference to it from the File Allocation Table but eventually the
data can be overwritten by new file writes which happens all the time. The
link below is to some free and not free file recovery tools. If at all
possible install the file recovery tool on a separate drive partition even
if it means that you place the hard drive in question in another computer as
a slave/secondary drive temporarily to avoid overwriting files with the
installation of the file recovery program. --- Steve

http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/ [...] overy.html ---
Restoration is pretty decent
http://www.snapfiles.com/shareware [...] overy.html --- File
Scavenger is very good.

"Gabriel" <Gabriel @discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5FD985CE-7B16-4A53-9369-68F66BA4B62E@microsoft.com...
>I have a problem and i seriously need advice :
>
> I have migrated a workstation from workgroup to domain. I have created the
> new domain profile when i logged in as the domain user. Then i logged
> into
> this workstation with a local administrator account to copy the old local
> profile to the new domain profile.
>
> When copying the user profile, i found that it was taking too long and My
> Documents folder had 10GB of data in it. So I moved 'My Documents' folder
> to
> another location and copied the profile again to shorten the time. Later
> when
> the profile has been copied, I moved that 'My Documents' folder into the
> new
> domain profile.
>
> Next, I log in as the domain user. I check My Documents and it is empty. I
> checked the hard disk capacity and it has gained an additional 10GB! So i
> assume that the files have been deleted. I have searched for the files but
> to
> no avail.
>
> How could this happen? Has this ever happened before? And are there any
> ways
> to rectify this problem?
>
> Any help is deeply appreciated. The user has his life's work gone.