Corrupt Txt files?

[Rob Wilco]

This is the creepiest thing I've seen in a while, I had some important text files on my desktop and now that I have windows 7 RTM installed on my machine, I went to access said txt files, and they were blank. Checked a few others, and they were okay. Here's the thing though, it appears that any txt files on my desktop that were under a certain size (seems like any that were < 10kb) got totally cleared. They're just blank now. Under properties, something interesting to note, is that under size it just says 576 bytes (like a blank txt file would be) but right underneath, it says size on disk = 4KB. Which was how big the file was. I checked my backup and then the same thing happened. The original backup was fine, and when I first copied them over they were readable. I've done a full chkdsk as well to make sure something wasn't a bit off in the file system. I'm worried to check any of these others txt files of mine for fear that they get corrupt as well.
If anyone has had a problem similar to this, it would be great if we could find a solution. I'm a little worried this could happen again, and it would also be nice to get these txt files readable again, it seems the data is still there, but there's nothing present. Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance.

 

[Ian]

That problem has got me stumped

I have loads of .txt files on my desktop full of snippets of information (like ToDo.txt, Ideas.txt, etc...) but I've not had this problem yet.

Unfortunately I don't think your information is still there, as the "size on disk" is always bigger than the actual file size due to the way the file system works. The smallest cluster size your drive can store is 4k, so a file with an actual byte count less than this still takes up 4k of space on the disk.

Here's an example of my ToDo.txt file:

 

[Rob Wilco]

Thanks Ian for your reply, what I'm thinking may have happened now is when I had to do a hard reset a while back, those files may have gotten corrupt at some point and maybe back to when I did a backup of them to begin with. I'm really hoping this has nothing to do with 7 now, because it sure would be scary if it had to do with it. Also, as far as the text files on the desktop I was able to replace most of them again, so no huge losses. Also I kind of forgot about the whole size on disk thing, but now that I think of it, it makes sense. Even if the size of the file is like 1 byte, it should still take up 4kb on disk (4096b clusters when formatting with ntfs by default, makes sense)


Thanks again for your thoughts