Folder Vanished in Windows 10

Maybe it got quarantined by your virus scanner?

I hope you find your files, but let this be a lesson that you carry with you forever. You need at minimum 3 copies of all important files, for example one on your computer, one on your external (though I'd recommend getting a NAS), and one off-site (like cloud storage). Further, at least one copy should have an immutable version history to restore from in case of ransomware attack.

It's just stupid that Windows does this. It has happened before and it happens a lot because the search engine has countless topics on it.

You're right I should update my external. I almost bit the bullet and did a NAS a few years back.

If you know the exact folder name, try seeing if you can access it directly from File Explorer by typing out the whole path name in the address bar

Edit: If you can get to it this way, Windows being Windows deciding to make this a system folder and has hidden it. I have to deal with it every now and then when I robocopy directories

A real longshot, but you could try a disk wide search for a file that was in the missing folder by the actual name of the file.

I've tried doing the "show hidden folders" in "This PC".
I'll give this a try.
Thanks for the idea

I'm at that point almost of getting a recovery software. It's frustrating because I've had it happen and I was able fix it myself.

Here I was last night getting ready to do taxes and I downloaded my W-2 and went to dump it in this folder and I get the message that "This folder or path doesn't exist".

Understand you've done some basic searches for files by name, etc. One other option might be to try to search by date modified if you haven't tried it. If you know you filed on Feb 9 last year, for example, you might try a date range of Feb 1 - Feb 9, 2023 (assuming you changed or added docs to the folder in the week or so leading up to last year's filing). Might take a few minutes for Windows to index the files this way, but maybe worth a shot.