u/DevisPooping

Hey everyone,

I’m in a massive bind. On May 15th, I manually ran the "Optimizer/Cleaner" feature in the OMEN Gaming Hub app, and it completely wiped my entire Windows 11 Downloads folder without sending anything to the Recycle Bin.

I lost critical ongoing design projects (specifically large Adobe Illustrator .ai files and PDFs).

Here is what I’ve already tried and ruled out:

• Recycle Bin: Completely empty.
• Command Line Check: Ran dir /a on the path. The directory physically exists but reports 0 files, 0 bytes. The timestamp of the wipe was May 15th at 14:05.
• Cloud Backups: Checked both personal and corporate OneDrive folders/recycle bins (including the second-stage recycle bin). Nothing was intercepted in time.
• Data Recovery Software: Ran Windows File Recovery (winfr) in both /regular and /extensive modes, as well as Recuva Deep Scan. They only brought back generic system cache files (.webm, .svg from app interfaces). No actual project files were found, or the few that turned up were completely corrupted (Error 0xc0000242). I suspect a TRIM command was immediately executed on my SSD right after the manual wipe.
• Shadow Copies / System Protection: Launched ShadowExplorer, but "System Protection" was unfortunately disabled on my C: drive, so there are no restore points or previous versions available from that date.
• Adobe Scratch/Temp Files: Checked %appdata%\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator [Version] Settings\fr_FR\DataRecovery—it’s completely empty. Checked the global %temp% folder for *.tmp files matching the file sizes, nothing usable.

Before I completely give up and accept having to rebuild days of creative work from scratch, is there ANY hidden Windows 11 under-the-hood safety net or Adobe-specific cache location I might have overlooked? Any advanced technical suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance.