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I'm a pretty resourceful dude for thinking up. When I did that, the downloads folder seemed to work again. It's fine, maybe I can just go into my user folder and make a new folder called downloads, and Windows won't know the difference. After that it kept bluescreening while trying to boot) (Edit for full posterity: the sfc command also failed, as did regular disk repair. When I tried rolling back to a previous restore point, it failed. When it tried to repair the drive when it rebooted, it failed. I googled "accidentally deleted Downloads folder" and tried the main fixes, like chkdsk in CMD. I went into explorer to check, and sure enough when I clicked on Downloads in the left pane, it gave me an error saying the folder was inaccessible.
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It literally deleted the Downloads folder. I assumed the program would know not to literally delete the downloads folder because who knows what that would do. And instead of deleting the files inside it, I clicked on the actual Downloads folder and hit delete.
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But instead of going to the folder in Explorer to empty it, I did it in WinDirStat.
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So when I scanned my OS drive and saw that my Downloads folder was taking up a large portion of my relatively small SSD, I decided to empty it. Also worth noting is that Windirstat has more power than the user does. And maybe I'm just an idiot, but I'll definitely be more wary of what I do with it after what happened to me today.įor anyone who doesn't know, WinDirStat is a tool that scans your drives and shows you visually what is taking up space on your drives and lets you access and (importantly to this story) delete folders/files from within the program.
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