So, with the admonitions out of the way, I do have a few things for you to try.Ĭheck the Recycle Bin. If your Downloads folder had been getting backed up (as an image backup would have ensured), you wouldn’t have lost anything except the time to locate the backup copy and restore the file(s). My recommendation is a periodic image backup, with daily incremental backups, but the details matter less than doing it. If you lost something because it was deleted, then it’s pretty obvious you hadn’t backed it up.Ĭhange that. That’s true whether it was in the Downloads folder or anywhere else.

Seriously, if you lost a file because the one copy you had of it disappeared, clearly you aren’t backing up. If you lost anything, you aren’t backing up Perhaps create folders by topic, or whatever makes sense to you.īut move them somewhere else. Maybe create a “Utilities” folder in your Documents folder, maybe create a “Downloaded PDFs” folder somewhere. Instead, once you’ve downloaded something you intend to keep - anything - move it to a different folder of your own. It was never intended as a place to keep things, and leaving things in the Downloads folder is a recipe for disaster, which you’re discovering. In my opinion, the Downloads folder should never be used for long-term storage. More importantly, in my opinion you’re doing two things wrong, and one of those could impact much more than just downloads.ĭownloads is for downloads, not for storage An empty Downloads folder. There are many possibilities, and I’ll run through a few options to see if we can get lucky.

It really depends on how or why the files disappeared.

What files are downloading right now