NextPVR Deleted All My Important Files on SSD

[yngsadstn]

So, yeah, you read that right. I'll be brief because I'm really not doing well after this happened. I downloaded PVR today, discovered it, and was learning to configure it, created my login, and couldn't access the localhost web even though everything was active. After 30 minutes of adjusting the program on the laptop with the native PC version and still failing to log in with "admin"/"admin," I decided to uninstall to reset my settings. When I went to the uninstall section, it asked if I wanted to "uninstall the program only and leave the settings" or "uninstall everything." I clicked on uninstall everything, and that's when the PVR program incinerated ALL my 248GB of files on my SSD.

I'm devastated right now. I didn't lose useless files that you can just open Chrome and download again. No, I lost saved passwords + encrypted passwords/recovery passwords for other programs, I lost old photos, I lost videos in various formats - and probably if I try to recover them, many will be corrupted. I lost EVERYTHING, including memories and files that I never wanted to lose. If I could choose, I'd delete everything to save those specific files, which were basically half of the SSD. This new SSD served as a "backup" for my files. My computer is weak and old (my dad worked so hard to buy it, and it's the simplest computer with the lowest specs you can imagine), the computer's storage only has 30GB in total, and the SSD was saving me.

I know it seems stupid to use an SSD to store things and not lose them, but unfortunately, I don't have a computer with 1TB of storage, I don't have x1 or x3 1TB HDs for different parts and moments of my use, not even USB drives that can store so many files. That's it. I'm feeling really bad, I wrote too much, I'm shaking and my hands are cold. I don't know how this happened. I have no idea. My computer doesn't have a virus, there are no malicious programs installed, it was just when I tried to uninstall the program that this happened. It makes me really sad. I still don't know what to do, I don't know how to recover all these files without them getting corrupted, or how to proceed if there's not enough space to recover the really important files. Probably if I try to recover everything that was deleted on the SSD, there will be more than 600GB deleted, and I'm lost and worried that the SSD will fill up during the recovery and I will lose more data. I do not have another drive or external storage available at the moment.

[mvallevand]

Sorry to hear that and sub will need to comment on how he has configured the uninstall especially for recordings but I have a question. I would assume delete everything means the NPVR-data folder and not other folders. Did you configure NextPVR to use the root of your SSD for programs or data? This would not be easy to do and couldn't be done by mistake but basically tells NextPVR it "owns" those folders.

Martin

[sub]

I've checked the code, and honestly I can't see that being possible. We've also never had a report of that happening in the past, and NextPVR's uninstaller hasn't changed for years.

It only deletes content in the NPVR-data directory, and the NextPVR executable directory.

[yngsadstn]

To the guys who responded to me, I apologize for not responding sooner. I've been devastated since this post, and I didn't even want to comment anymore. My entire month has been horrible since then, I haven't used my computer for a while and I even wanted to forget this ever happened.

To clarify, I did save NextPVR completely to the C: directory, but the files were in a folder on the SSD to save space (how I explained before), not in the root of the SSD. My concern is that when I chose the "uninstall everything" option, everything on the SSD were deleted, which shouldn't have happened. Also, what I may have forgotten to mention in my initial post is that when I uninstalled the program, this also ended up changing the properties of the SSD.

If you see this, I would like to ask something.. A question about how the installation and uninstallation of the program is supposed to work. Let's say If I had chosen the SSD as the directory to store all of NextPVR's data, but kept that data in a specific folder called "NPVR" for example, the program should only have access to the files inside that folder, right? I don't know if the installer asked for permission to become 'Administrator' of my computer, I don't remember, and I believe that it doesn't happen.

If uninstalling the program deleted files outside of that folder, even though I had configured the program to use that specific folder and extracted it to that location, would that indicate a problem with the uninstaller or with the software's permissions management? or none of the options?

There shouldn't be any program that has permission to uninstall or delete files that weren't originally installed by it. It's like if you install a game on Local C and then uninstall it and it ended up deleting all of the files on the disk!

[mvallevand]

I confirmed what sub posted NextPVR only deletes all files in the program folder and optionally in the data folder when everything is selected. The defaults on Windows are

C:\Program Files\NextPVR
C:\Users\Public\NPVR-data

Your wrote that you "adjusted the program" so if either pointed to a root folder everything there would have been deleted. Thinking of this it not even clear how your example to use "NPVR" on an SSD could even be accomplished that would take extensive knowledge.

Perhaps you tried a symlink from C:\Users\Public\NPVR-data to E:\ so that would still be the root.

Uninstall does need admin rights but NextPVR doesn't keep track of files that are located in the data or program folders. I would suggest that if you told a game that D:\ was where it's configuration was stored it would delete whatever was there.

this also ended up changing the properties of the SSD.

The uninstaller definitely wouldn't go to that level. Trusting what you say and you didn't move anything to the root, I strongly feel that although sad, you just had the unfortunate coincidence of a disk failure when the uninstall happened. A corrupt drive could certainly explain your configuration issues.

Martin