Recently I purchased a 2 TB external hard drive for backup. In my computer there are four “drives” (i.e. partitions) so using TeraCopy I copied all the drives onto the external backup drive. However, during the process one of the drives was cleaned-out – all the folders are now empty. The copy on the external hard drive is the same – all the folders have copied but they are empty of any files. Do you know why this has happened and how I can restore the files?

This is very strange, and to be honest I have no idea why this would have happened. The only possibility is that TeraCopy was configured to move the files, rather than copy the files, which would explain why the files disappeared from the computer, but does not explain why they are not present on the backup drive or why the folder structure is still present on both the computer and external hard drive (but with no files). Recovery of the files could be tricky, simply because we have no idea how the files got removed. First, check that the files are not located in the Recycle Bin on the computer, just in case they have been deleted but not yet fully removed from the computer. If this fails then you may wish to look at some basic file recovery. A good free utility for this purpose is Recuva (www.piriform.com/recuva) which allows you to look for deleted files and (assuming that they are still intact) recover the original file. This could be a bit of a lengthy process, since I imagine that quite a few files are missing, but it may give you a method to retrieve some of these files.

If you do find out exactly what happened with the files then please let me know, as this is a bit of a mystery and I would be interested to hear the actual cause.