I am posting this forum because I do not know where to go and most of the missing documents are Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel going back as far as the late 1990s. The missing documents do include some PDFs and OpenOffice files and a few other types of files as well. I have Microsoft Office 2010 on my Windows 7 computer and Microsoft Office 2013 on my Windows 8 computer.



Could this problem be related to changing versions of Office?
If this post is inappropriate to this form please advise as to where I might go.


Over the years I’ve backed up my documents to various USB devices and they may or may not have gone through my next computer every year or 2.
Now, particularly on my current USB devices, but also more recently on the secondary internal hard drives on both a Windows 7 and Windows 8 laptop there are empty folders. That is to say, all folders (which are folders within folders within folders within folders etc.) are probably present but are completely empty and most of these files were Microsoft Office documents.
This occurs despite re-installing increasingly older Windows 7 images as well as after a recent complete DVD Windows 7 installation performed, hoping this would correct my problem.

Interestingly at least one of the properties dialogs indicates 52 GB of data in a folder yet all sub-folders are empty. Recuva freeware did not help.

I will greatly appreciate advice or direction.