O God...please help, anyone who knows Windows (I'm on XP) computers!

I have a back-up drive connected to about four computers in this house with many folders in it....one for me, one for my dad, one for my mom, etc. This morning I did something--apparently: I'm not even sure what--and the shortcut to my folder on that back-up (and my folder alone, nothing else) disappeared so that I can't access any of my files on it. Most of my files on the back-up are also on my computer hard-drive proper, but I had gotten into the habit of just saving to the outside drive and not to the hard-drive, and I haven't reconciled the two since probably Christmas or shortly thereafter, so that there are some documents on the back-up not also on the hard-drive.

Needless to say, I would like to regain these documents, pronto. I checked the recycling bin and found, perplexingly, some of them, but the majority are nowhere to be found. My question right now is, if I go back to a Windows restore point of, say, yesterday, will that do anything, considering that the files in question are (were?) not on the computer but on the back-up drive? I'm willing to try, even if it does nothing, but I don't want to get into any worse trouble than I'm already in. If the restore point won't help with an outside drive, do you have any idea what will?

Please, please, please....I want these files back!

On Edit: I GOT THEM BACK. It appears I, as Crabby Appleton suggests below, inadvertently dragged my folder into another folder, still within the back-up drive. I found this and fixed it up....and it still works and is perfectly accessible from MS Word, etc., etc. I am ridiculously off-target for what I wanted to do for work, etc. today and have to go into the office now, but when I get home, the first thing I'm doing is reconciling all these different folders into one another so that the hard-drive has on it everything that's on the back-up, and vice versa. Thanks for all your help!

It's really only for last-ditch efforts and I'm certain it won't do what you want in this situation, as it is for restoring the operating system and programs, and not for files.

Have you checked to see if there is a recycle bin on the backup drive itself?

I have called up the people who know what the hell is going on here, better than I do, but said people (really one person) is annoyingly unreachable at the moment, and I want to know if there's anything I can do in the meantime. What annoys the snot out of me is that some files were found in the recycle bin, but not all--mostly the music files and a few random Word documents that now read as "Copy of (document name)." They are restored and can be accessed via a folder shortcut on the back-up drive, but nothing else.

FUCK.

Then go to "Explore" on that menu.

You should see the backup drive mapped under "My Computer" to a drive letter. Click on it to see the folders on that drive.

There's another folder on the back-up drive that has within it my own folder (somehow! gloriously!) I just checked and the files on this second copy of my folder seem to be the same files that were on the primary copy of my folder before it got mysteriously nixed. I'm trying to see right now if they are in fact updated....

If this is what I want, can I move it back into the partially-restored (with music, etc. from the computer hard-drive recycling bin) original shortcut via copy-paste or some similar function?

or drag the files you want onto your hard drive.

I knew something sort of weird and unconscious on my part had happened. I'm going into Word now to see if it seems to be working all right...

Not with the same white hot intensity with which I hate Internet Explorer, but close. I use Total Commander...

Think of the name of a file you know should be on your harddrive.

Goto Start | Search | For Files and Folders and search for that file.

If you have saved your files to a "default location", if you find that file, others will probably be there.

All appears to be in working order now, and I edited the OP to reflect this. I have some updating of my hard-drive and back-up to do later, but I need to go to work now. Thanks to those of you who helped!

:hi: