Where are my original local Files?

Just installed nextcould on my server, and the client on my Windows 10 computer with decades of personal files (i.e. bank statements, birth certificated, and literally 40 years of files.). Today while downloading a bank statement a trying to save it in the banks folder I discover it’s gone! along with nearly ever other personal record. I mean close to half a terabyte of info just disappeared. I’ve deleted the desktop client and am about to trash nextcloud for good. But first I’d like to know if it’s possible to recover the files nextcloud indiscriminately removed?
My desktop is a Windows 10 64bit computer with approximately 5 Tb of hard-drive storage. The server is an Ubuntu 20.04 with a dedicated 1 Tb data store drive.
I just installed nextcloud yesterday and today my files are gone. I never asked nextcloud to move any files or to destroy my life’s documentation.
Can I recover from this and divorce my self from nextcloud’s destruction?

You need to be more precise about what you have actually done. Nextcloud will should not remove files outside it’s directory and normally also not in it’s directory. It depends how you had configured the Nextcloud Client

I understand your frustration, but you’ll have to detail your exact process in order to get help with this highly irregular situation.

The simplest solution would be to restore from your backup and then go back through the setup process to try to determine what happened.

Am restoring backups now. Have uninstalled the desktop client. My exact process was to install server, logged as admin, explored some docs, installed client, went to bed. Woke up this morning to the disaster.
I’m a retired Director of IT and was simple looking for a convenient way to have access to my files while traveling. already had a web-server and could have just stored files on it. Inconvenient, but I could have worked with that. Nextcloud sounded good but there was no suggesting that it would take control of my local machine. This is why I no longer use internet services that want to take over my life.
I’ll resolve this myself. Nothing I did should have caused this issue. As I see it, Nextcloud is not mature enough for prime time. looking into OurCloud as a possible replacement.

Have a great day, and good luck with denial and deflection.

The desktop client by default just touches “%userprofile%\Nextcloud”. It should not touch any other file placed outside that folder.

Maybe you accidentally selected some other directory, not empty, then said one “yes” too many and overwrote the whole content with the server content (which, because empty, deleted the content)

Nope, I did nothing with the desktop client except install it. I read some documentation online, where I discovered that the client existed. I downloaded and installed it then went to bed because I saw more required reading. So, I quit and went to bed. I’m not the first to have data lose from use of the Nextcloud client. You have an issue! Even if it is poor documentation and guidance to new users. I’ve resolve the lost data issue, removed the client, and disabled the server. Personally I suspect the client has an issue. I just don’t have time to deal with it. Consider this issue solved

IMHO your attitude is wrong, you’ll get the same problem with owncloud or whatever else (ps: owncloud and its client are very similar to nextcloud)

From your description looks like it’s the client who acted like malware deleting random files in the drive. I didn’t see any issues like this. It must be happened something else, as files don’t just disappear overnight

Did you overwrite the important folder during install? Or you moved stuff over there and it got deleted after syncing with the server? Maybe misconfigured the server to save the data to /dev/null ? Your description of the problem is extremely vague. As a director of IT, if one of your users opened a ticket “it doesn’t work, your infrastructure is shit” and refused to give more details, what would have been your reaction?

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If that’s true, then you had a new Nextcloud folder on your computer that contained the example files from the server, and the files you say were wiped were not even in the folder being synced. You are not telling the whole story, so it’s not possible to diagnose your issue.

Yep, You’re probably right. Tthe software’s infallible and I’m a liar, Thanks for the help. Problem solved.

I’ll do an analogy because looks like your years in IT had no effect in describing problems correctly for a ticket. Again, 4 posts and none of them describe the issue.

Analogy starting here:

You feel sick and you go to the doctor.

You start a rant about the bad quality of the hospital, you complain about a very big pain which precludes you to do any job.

Doctor asks you where is painful, what are the symptoms.

You reply that you have 3 PhD in medicine, and that the pain is really unbearable, please hurry to cure me.

Doctor asks again where the pain comes from; his colleague comes and asks also what are the symptoms, he is skeptical because those symptoms don’t match the description

You reply that everyone is incompetent, don’t need to be cured anyways because you’re going to go to the identical hospital cross the road