I’ve had decades of weird, perplexing, infuriating things happen with computers, but I think this might be the weirdest yet.
As best I can ascertain, my Western Digital MyPassport has gone back in time.
I use this drive for my Premiere Pro video projects. I clicked on it for the first time in a month or two tonight, in order to resume work on my most recent video project. I was maybe 60% of the way through it last time I worked on it. Nowhere on the drive do I see that Premiere file. Nor for that matter does the Word document exist wherein I wrote up detailed notes on what I intended for this project.
So I checked my second to last video project. This is one I completed a few months ago and exported the video file. There is no longer any sign of that video file on the drive.
Perhaps these files got somehow deleted, hidden, corrupted, whatever. I don’t know how that could have happened, but at least I can understand that as a plausible scenario.
But where it gets especially strange is I then looked for the Premiere file of the second to last project, actually found this one, and opened it. It opens on Premiere as what that project was at an early stage, like maybe 20% of the way through.
I can understand–though I’d be alarmed and unhappy–if the file no longer existed. But how did it go back in time?
It’s like the whole drive was reset to a few months earlier. Files that didn’t yet exist then are missing, and files that existed then and that I subsequently worked on open up, seem to exist only as their earlier version from back then.
I’ve heard of restoring a drive to an earlier point, but I never did that with this drive (certainly not intentionally). Out of curiosity, tonight I right-clicked on the drive and clicked on “restore previous versions.” It came back with “there are no previous versions available,” which makes sense since I never created any kind of restoration point, assuming that’s something that must be done intentionally.
So did the drive create its own restoration point, and then take it upon itself to reset itself back to that point?
I’d be surprised if anything can be done, as presumably it’s too late to undo the damage, but it’s a pretty big deal. I’d estimate that I’m losing about 50-100 hours of labor with my most recent project gone entirely and the one before that set back to an early stage.
