System Restore After Windows Reset

[rmb26023]

Unfortunately my grandmother was scammed by a fake tech support site. Long story short they some how corrupted her windows 10 profile (she has only a local admin, no tied Microsoft account). This forced her to a temp account with no access to her files. I attempted to recover the files by making another local admin. but windows wouldn't let me see her user folder. Finally I decided to reset windows using the keep all personal files options. The account is not corrupted anymore, but her files still are not there. The storage space on the PC has not changed so I know they are some where. The recovery apps show no system restore points and claims that there is no recovery drive. Any advice or how to recover these files would be very helpful, thank you.

[Grzwacz]

Greetings,

Welcome to the forum.

I am not a HP employee.

There are various degrees of fake tech support scams. Exfiltration of sensitive data, key logging, loss of data, or file encryption are possible.

That's a tough scenario. The bad guys may have encrypted data, so possibly no change in storage space statistics and this characteristic metastasizes to the clean installation. I am only guessing.

You could try connecting the operating system storage device to a different PC as a data drive.

Check the primary user folder for data.

It is possible the data is not retrievable.

Data backups to offline external media precludes this problem.

Regards