Windows 10 glitch

Any suggestions?

Earlier today, I had a couple of important folders open, and windows 10 chocked on me. When I finally was able to exit the system, and restart it, both folders were gone. Everything had open, is simply gone. I can do without a word and excel document I had open, but need the files in those folders that are now missing.

The were in the trash can, or elsewhere. Just missing.

I then, in retrospect, made matters worse. I did a full virus check with Norton. Just the directory entry pointers were missing. Now it's possible with more activity, I overwrote what ever sectors these 8GB plus of important data were on. These files are about 4 weeks old now.

Anyway, Norton was set to shutdown the computer when finished. I then bought a mSATA to USB3 adaptor, and cloned the drive to a fresh 1 TB HD. I already had my laptop set for cloning and have two USB 3.0 to SATA adapters, so the process was simple. The cloning process took a miserable hour and 23 minutes though. I'm ready to put the new 1 TB drive in my tower, and see if the latest automatic backup on my other internal 1 TB drive will fix it. I doubt it will, but I'm going to try.

Anyway, if this isn't successful, does anyone know of good software that will scan a hard drive for such missing files?

Maybe I need a RAID...

These guys are really serious about helping, and have never let me down.

https://www.tenforums.com/

EDIT: BTW, go into the forums.

It's worth a shot. You may have your files saved with a different extension created by Microsoft for unattached (?) data. Maybe. Or not.

Good luck, hope you find them.