Is it possible to view the history of a drive's activity in windows

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peppergomez

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Sep 15, 2011
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I just had a subfolder with multiple subfolders inside of it vanish from one of my drives. It was several hundred gigs in size and I did not delete it. Thankfully the data was backed up but I have no clue why it's gone. It was a subfolder inside a parent folder. And there are 4 or 5 other folders in that same parent folder. And those are all still there. So I have no idea why the particular one vanished. I would like to be able to see some sort of history of activity for that drive or for windows actionsto find out what in the heck hhappened. As well as to find out if other folders were deleted as well without my knowledge.

Is it possible to view this in Windows 11?
 
If you didn't have object auditing enabled (you probably didn't, it's not by default and the logs get huge), about your only recourse would be to see if the drive is starting to fail. If it's healthy, that means you deleted the folder/files, most likely.
 
I believe you would've needed to have had an auditing policy already established (or pushed down through GPO, which most likely wouldn't be present on a home PC.) Without that, Event Viewer will not track file/folder deletion.
 
Okay thanks no I wouldn't have had that enabled and I didn't delete the folder, I know that for certain. Can you recommend some good drive health evaluation apps so I can see if the drive is failing?
 
Pro Tip - Right click Recycle Bin and check the box that says Display delete confirmation dialog.
 
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