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.