Uninstalling Steam removed desktop icons?

[Jennifer Lawrence]

Anyone know how to reverse this or what the hell even causes this to even happen? I have steam installed on my games drive which is a separate 1TB drive. Went to the installation location and used the uninstall.exe, going through the process, all of a sudden i see my desktop icons disappear. Not in the recycle bin, not in recent, completely gone. Im also missing some designs that are extremely important to a project im working on for a company. Any way to get these back? What the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hell steam.

[The HopelessGamer™]

You could try using https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

Not sure if its going to work too well but it might..... Otherwise chances are those files are gone.

[Jennifer Lawrence]

Originally posted by The HopelessGamer™:

You could try using https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

Not sure if its going to work too well but it might..... Otherwise chances are those files are gone.

Yea i saw on another thread to try that. Good news is i did get back some files, bad news i didnt get back all of them, including my cinema 4d project files. Thanks steam for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up my deadline.

[The HopelessGamer™]

Originally posted by Jennifer Lawrence:

Originally posted by The HopelessGamer™:

You could try using https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

Not sure if its going to work too well but it might..... Otherwise chances are those files are gone.

Yea i saw on another thread to try that. Good news is i did get back some files, bad news i didnt get back all of them, including my cinema 4d project files. Thanks steam for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up my deadline.

Oh ouch... Sorry dude thats gonna be a big pain...

When installing steam, its generally best to install it to its default installation path otherwise these things can happen from time to time.

[MancSoulja]

Steam will delete anything in its install path when uninstalled. I've heard stories of people accidently installing Steam to My Documents and losing everything.

[Jennifer Lawrence]

Originally posted by The HopelessGamer™:

Originally posted by Jennifer Lawrence:

Yea i saw on another thread to try that. Good news is i did get back some files, bad news i didnt get back all of them, including my cinema 4d project files. Thanks steam for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up my deadline.

Oh ouch... Sorry dude thats gonna be a big pain...

When installing steam, its generally best to install it to its default installation path otherwise these things can happen from time to time.

????????????????????????????
Isn't the default location where steam was originally installed?

[The HopelessGamer™]

Originally posted by Jennifer Lawrence:

Originally posted by The HopelessGamer™:

Oh ouch... Sorry dude thats gonna be a big pain...

When installing steam, its generally best to install it to its default installation path otherwise these things can happen from time to time.

????????????????????????????
Isn't the default location where steam was originally installed?

I was just saying if its not in the default path, something like this could happen:

Originally posted by MancSoulja:

Steam will delete anything in its install path when uninstalled. I've heard stories of people accidently installing Steam to My Documents and losing everything.

[Jennifer Lawrence]

Originally posted by MancSoulja:

Steam will delete anything in its install path when uninstalled. I've heard stories of people accidently installing Steam to My Documents and losing everything.

Thats what i dont understand though. I installed it on its own separate drive away from the C drive where i keep all my daily stuff. Why the hell is it deleting stuff that isnt even located on the current drive? The work i lost was on the C drive also. All game-related stuff goes on my 1tb D drive.

[The HopelessGamer™]

Originally posted by Jennifer Lawrence:

Originally posted by MancSoulja:

Steam will delete anything in its install path when uninstalled. I've heard stories of people accidently installing Steam to My Documents and losing everything.

Thats what i dont understand though. I installed it on its own separate drive away from the C drive where i keep all my daily stuff. Why the hell is it deleting stuff that isnt even located on the current drive? The work i lost was on the C drive also. All game-related stuff goes on my 1tb D drive.

Thats where im confused. Makes me think something else is causing the issue. You sure you did not accidentally hide your icons? Did all of them vanish or just a few?

[Jennifer Lawrence]

Originally posted by The HopelessGamer™:

Originally posted by Jennifer Lawrence:

Thats what i dont understand though. I installed it on its own separate drive away from the C drive where i keep all my daily stuff. Why the hell is it deleting stuff that isnt even located on the current drive? The work i lost was on the C drive also. All game-related stuff goes on my 1tb D drive.

Thats where im confused. Makes me think something else is causing the issue. You sure you did not accidentally hide your icons? Did all of them vanish or just a few?

Probably something else causing this yea. And no. I did accidentally hide icons once but that was an issue with hidden files that i just had to undo. But all my icons/files were in a saved folder. I checked if that was the issue again here but it wasn't. And around half of them did get removed. Recuva did work but didn't manage to restore all of them. It was prob because i was frantic in that moment and started diving through my files because i did see some files and icons that came up saying they were overwritten.

[The HopelessGamer™]

Originally posted by Jennifer Lawrence:

Originally posted by The HopelessGamer™:

Thats where im confused. Makes me think something else is causing the issue. You sure you did not accidentally hide your icons? Did all of them vanish or just a few?

Probably something else causing this yea. And no. I did accidentally hide icons once but that was an issue with hidden files that i just had to undo. But all my icons/files were in a saved folder. I checked if that was the issue again here but it wasn't. And around half of them did get removed. Recuva did work but didn't manage to restore all of them. It was prob because i was frantic in that moment and started diving through my files because i did see some files and icons that came up saying they were overwritten.

Oh no... FeelsBadMan

For future reference, i highly recommend you invest in a NAS or Cloud Storage like one drive. It will help with the type of work you do as it provides a off site storage system if you use cloud based storage and if you use a NAS it keeps everything completely separate so if your computer malfunctions like what happened today, your files will be kept safe.

[↑↑↓↓←→←→BASelect]

If you want a chance to recover files that you deleted by mistake it's best not to use that drive writing to or deleting from that drive. It makes recovery less possible. Last year i thought i lost over 2 tb of data. Some how the MBR on my storage drive got deleted. But i was lucky and rebuilding my MBR gave me back my files. I suggest getting a usb external drive and places all data that needs to be in a safe location and then disconnecting that drive when not in use.

[MancSoulja]

Usually when Steam ends up on the desktop, it's because you've tried to create a desktop shortcut, but accidentally dragged and dropped the .exe there instead.

[Hanomaly]

Originally posted by MancSoulja:

Usually when Steam ends up on the desktop, it's because you've tried to create a desktop shortcut, but accidentally dragged and dropped the .exe there instead.

And this can especially happen if Steam is installed on a *different* drive than C, since Desktop tends to be C. If the user tried to drag a shortcut of Steam from it's drive to Desktop, it very well might have made a new .exe for steam instead of a proper Shortcut.

That would be an OS issue, not Steam's fault tho.

[Muppet among Puppets]

Originally posted by Hanomaly:

Originally posted by MancSoulja:

Usually when Steam ends up on the desktop, it's because you've tried to create a desktop shortcut, but accidentally dragged and dropped the .exe there instead.

And this can especially happen if Steam is installed on a *different* drive than C, since Desktop tends to be C. If the user tried to drag a shortcut of Steam from it's drive to Desktop, it very well might have made a new .exe for steam instead of a proper Shortcut.

That would be an OS issue, not Steam's fault tho.

That has nothing to do if steam is on any drive or not.

If exe ends up anywhere, everything around it might get "uninstalled".

[Callahan420]

Originally posted by Muppet among Puppets:

Originally posted by Hanomaly:

And this can especially happen if Steam is installed on a *different* drive than C, since Desktop tends to be C. If the user tried to drag a shortcut of Steam from it's drive to Desktop, it very well might have made a new .exe for steam instead of a proper Shortcut.

That would be an OS issue, not Steam's fault tho.

That has nothing to do if steam is on any drive or not.

If exe ends up anywhere, everything around it might get "uninstalled".

Well I learned something today. This could have been disastrous sometime back when I had the exe on my desktop.

Sorry for your loss.