Solved Lost Files After Update

I'm using a work computer, and I seem to have inexplicably lost about a months worth of new work / files. The computer had rebooted when I came in the other morning and I remember there being a message about an update the afternoon before, so presumably it was an automatic restart after installing the necessary updates. However, when I logged in, all of the files I'd been working on had disappeared.

It's only a selective loss because old work is still there, but it seems to have regressed to a point where last months work was only a week or so into completion. I tried using a recovery program but couldn't make head or tails of it. Restarted it multiple times since and still nothing. Do you have any advice?

Excel is mostly what I use, but I also use Access. It's a standalone, all-in-one HP TouchSmart running Windows 7. I just checked the database we use and it seems like all the data entered so far is up to date, which seems strange to me. It's really just a few of the most recent excel files that seem to have gone missing.

I had a look and there's nothing there. The work I had been doing had been saved, after every single session spent on it. There's no unsaved / recovered workbooks to be recovered. Access appears to be unaffected which is what strikes me as so unusual. The work done over the last month for the database is still there. It is as though the excel sheets were rolled back in time to before they existed, as one of the previous (complete) months' summaries has been reduced to where it was about half way through the month. I arranged all of the excel sheets by date modified and that's the most recent one available to me.

Weird! I did that and followed the address, and there were the files! They were moved into that folder destination exclusively, and wouldn't show up under back-up options or anything. Strange. At least now I know the data is safe! Thank you for the hint. Any idea what may have cause the location change at all? I don't want to risk this happening again.

Thank you both for the suggestion, but I'm a step ahead of you. We have an external drive that we plug in of a Friday and the computer automatically backs itself up over the weekend. We had a back-up ready, but I didn't want to have to do that unless it was totally necessary. Appreciate everyone's time and effort