Tried to run suggested autoclean up and lost almost entire c drive

[REDACTED]

I have (or had, i guess) free avast. I tried to run the automatic clean up, but since it was premium and had to give my credit card info for the free trial, I declined.  I deleted a few of the programs it suggested and went online to go do somework, and after an hour I noticed my chrome and spotify shortcuts in the tool bar were gone.
So was my desktop background. And all of the desktop files and shortcuts. And then nearly everything on my C drive save the OS files and some other random things like autodesk . It had about 10gb free on it when i woke up today. Now it has 88 gbs free. I scanned earlier today and found no viruses, and it just happened after the attempt at the clean up, so it's the only thing I can think of that could have caused it. My pc never slowed down or had windows pop up. Could it have been that? What do i do? I apparently never backed up my files like an idiot.

[Stellarman]

I have (or had, i guess) free avast. I tried to run the automatic clean up, but since it was premium and had to give my credit card info for the free trial, I declined.  I deleted a few of the programs it suggested and went online to go do somework, and after an hour I noticed my chrome and spotify shortcuts in the tool bar were gone.
So was my desktop background. And all of the desktop files and shortcuts. And then nearly everything on my C drive save the OS files and some other random things like autodesk . It had about 10gb free on it when i woke up today. Now it has 88 gbs free. I scanned earlier today and found no viruses, and it just happened after the attempt at the clean up, so it's the only thing I can think of that could have caused it. My pc never slowed down or had windows pop up. Could it have been that? What do i do? I apparently never backed up my files like an idiot.

Hi,

we are terribly sorry about what happened to you.

So far we've never encountered such situation as you described it.

In order to be able to help you I would like to ask you to send the log files so we can investigate where the problem is.
You can simply send them by executing our log collector utility from this path C:\Program Files (x86)\AVAST Software\Avast Cleanup\tulogcollector.exe.
Just please add your email address there so we can join the logs with your report here.

Thank you.

[Stellarman]

To recover the files you have lost you can try to use this tool from Piriform (CCleaner guys): https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva.

Just please try to use a different hard drive if you have any or at least a flash drive (USB stick) to increase the chances that you will be able to recover the data.

Recovering to the same hard drive might cause the data unrecoverable.