Top Secret PDF's Missing

I have over 15 GB of downloaded files on my computer..I had over 20 Top Secret Files from all over the web..I went to skim thru them and found they were all missing..Every single file I have ever downloaded is still there, except for the TS ones..Anybody have a similar experience of dissapearing files?

My not strictly legitimate version of guitar pro deleted itself recently, leaving dead icons in the folder. I was not impressed! Nothing top secret though..

Did you have them backed up?

What top secret fils do you have???

I suggest you password protect your BIOS. Also do a Virus Scan.

I noticed yesterday that in two files I have with different topics a few things were missing. I would click on it and it would tell me it wasn't there. I just read one of them a week ago. I had a friend online who wanted to read some documents I had and now my computer tells me they are not there.

I have a question about stuff like this even stuff that isn't top secret. When you download a PDF or document, can it be deleted from your computer if it's deleted from the original place you got it from. I don't mean to sound stupid I really don't know how all this works.

I don't remember what they were, they were 4 years worth, but they were there last week when I added the Red Cell Memorandum and various FOIA files released on different intelligence website's I sometime visit..No they weren't backed-up they were just in a folder labeled Top Secret in my Favorite Folder.
I kind of think it has something to do with me bouncing from one intelligence website to the next and clicking links people usually don't click..Or I figure maybe if you spend hours on an intelligence website maybe it raises some kind of Red Flag at the NSA or something and they search your harddrive. I'm not scared or anything, just found it weird given you can't even turn my comp on without an uncrackable password.

reply to post by ATLien


Try looking in the other folders in your Favorites Folder, perhaps you inadvertently dragged/dropped it by mistake. (?)

[ETA]

or do a search of your hard drive for "Top Secret". (?)

[edit on 2-9-2010 by 12m8keall2c]

I had a letter from Paul Martin from when he was the temp PM of Canada stating that he fully supported legalization of marijuana and taxing it like they do with alcohol. A couple weeks before they announced the election the email went missing from my email account and the hard copy that I saved on my hard drive. A friend of mine who works with the NDP also had a copy of the letter in his email that I had fwd to him and that was gone too.

i lose my car keys. losing files, to me, is no different. i am one of those "absent minded" types.

but it would not surprise me, and i would be it is what happens.

The lesson that can be learned from this is Back up your hard drives on a regular basis!

External drives of around a Tera byte are very affordable now and you can get backup software for free, It's also pre installed on windows 7.

I have a regular backup scheduled for once every couple of weeks, and its saved my life on more then 1 occasion, if your hard drive decides to die then you can lose everything you ever had in a second!

[edit on 2-9-2010 by davespanners]

I have taken thousands of pictures, and recently felt as if a large portion of them have gone missing. though haventt noticed much else.

well if you used trucrypt this wouldn't have happened. it's kinda funny to see "top secret files" not being protected by a unbreakable open source encryption software. There's little to no excuse why you wouldn't have made a little effort to protect those files

That is strange. I can't say that it has happened to me, however, if I were you I would download Peerblock so that you can block known government IPs from pinging your computer. In this way, you may be more protected. But if those are the only files that went missing, among many others, it was definitely done by some sort of intelligence, who could sort out black from white, whom may or may not have come from the government. But who knows


Good luck man!

reply to post by Keyouse

I don't know, now I'm kind of cautious..What do you know about that program? Other than what it describes on the website? I'm just gonna put my files on a USB from now on and then delete them.

Has no-one heard of data recovery? There are various free programs out there. They should be recoverable although you'd do best not to save or use your computer much for the best chance.

reply to post by ATLien


Please don't start keeping important files on flash drives, usb drives are built for temporary storage of non critical data, not for permanently holding stuff that you don't want to lose.

You can get a lot of problems with corruption of data on a flash drive if you don't unmount it properly before you remove it from your pc, and you can also accidentally drop them into your coffee if you are a bit hazy when you are using them.

If you want to keep anything important back it up multiple times onto as many media types as you can, i.e burn onto cd, move to an external drive, keep an encrypted zip file etc etc and then don't touch that back up until you really need it.

Originally posted by mblahnikluver
[..]
I have a question about stuff like this even stuff that isn't top secret. When you download a PDF or document, can it be deleted from your computer if it's deleted from the original place you got it from. I don't mean to sound stupid I really don't know how all this works.

When you download a file to your computer, you're actually making a physical copy of that file. If you click 'Open' instead of 'Save', it will be saved to a temporary directory - a directory that will be cleaned up at some point, for example at reboot. In both cases, the copy you made is physical; it is now stored on your harddisk in actual 0's and 1's. Noone can remove that file without access to your operating system (e.g. Windows).

I'm not too familiar with Windows anymore, but even though it has a history of backdoors and other gaping security holes, it should be absolutely impossible for someone to delete your file by deleting the original. Normally, there are no connections whatsoever; the server you downloaded the file from as well as your ISP may have a log of the download, but that shouldn't get them inside your computer.

Files can be deleted in two ways - either just the link to the file is deleted and the data remains intact until overwritten, or the link and the data get completely purged from the harddrive. Standard operation for Windows is the first, so you might be able to retrieve your files through file recovery utilities. Once again, I'm not up to date as far as Windows is concerned, but a simple freeware package like this one might do the trick. The sooner you run it, the better (since the lingering data may get overwritten by anything you do).

If the files truly have been intentionally deleted by a 'third party', then the best thing to do would be to protect your harddisk. Protecting your BIOS with a password won't help too much, since either they'd be capable of doing this while you're online, or they have actually broken into your home and thus can simply remove your harddisk from your computer and hook it up to a laptop - or whatever they want, really. So if you're going to protect your files, it would be best to use a type of encryption. Even a simple zip file with a password would offer some protection. Once again though, if there really is some third party with the capacity to get inside your harddisk, you might want to go for heavy encryption. Be sure to use 'low-profile' names for your files; when your files are encrypted, they may raise a flag just for being encrypted - but if they have obscure names like 'privatephotos', they won't know what they're spending their encryption-cracking-time on, or what they're deleting. Considering the latter, backups are always a good idea.

But first you might want to check how they may have gotten in. Your system should have a system log, in which every logon (either local or remote) is stored. In Vista, you can get there (IIRC) through Configurations -> System Administration -> Logs. Select the Security log and look for special logons. There is a lot of other stuff in there (such as logons by the system itself), so you may have to skim through the log a bit.

The best case scenario of course is to keep everyone's paws off of your harddisk, so make sure your firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware are working as they should be and that noone but you & your trustees know how to get in (remove old accounts with simple passwords!).

Let me know if the file recovery turns up with something!

Another member just messaged me with information about flash drives that I wasn't aware of, so I withdraw my assertion that they are unstable.

Making multiple backups is still best practice though.

Ohh and get a firewall if you don't already have one installed, I use Comodo as it's free and has worked pretty well for me for years.

reply to post by March of the Fire Ants


TuxGuitar


reply to post by ATLien


Not trying to be a jerk or anything but if they were on the web, they probably weren't that top secret. You can probably find them again if you look in the right place, and when ya do, be sure to make backups.

That being said, unless you erase and overwrite the free space with a program like Eraser, nothing is ever completely gone from your hard drive. Do a Google search on deleted file recovery; there's plenty of tools out there to help ya out. Best of luck and I hope you get your files back.

ETA: Just a thought and I'm not sure it will help at all, but try an alternate PDF viewer like Evince. Hope at least some of that helped.


TheAssoc.

[edit on 2-9-2010 by TheAssociate]

Unless your hard drive has been rubbed against a magnet or completely professionally wiped or formatted, nothing's really gone. You can download a program such as WinHex, or purchase a data recovery program, to get the files back if they're important.

reply to post by raz24400


You can set email to self destruct or time out and delete its self on a specific date or after a specific time. It has been a feature of Outlook since 03.