I hit an unknown combination of keys and

[House of Roberts]

everything I had open disappeared. I looked for a recovery and, not knowing what I did, couldn’t find anything to clue me into what to do. I never had this happen before. Any ideas what I did and how to recover it?
I am on my phone so as to not disturb the computer until I might get this stuff back.

[Walleye]

1. I don't have any advice, but I sympathize. I just turn my machine off and back on again.

[SheltieLover]

2. You might have hit Alt with F4. If so it's just gone.

Can you just reopen tabs?

Good luck!

[House of Roberts]

7. The tabs/windows aren't in the recently closed list.

The windows I had open aren’t listed as having been closed. I hope that means they are just hidden somehow.

[SheltieLover]

8. Dunno.

Gs is my resident IT guy & that's all he came up with.

I hope you can figure it out..

Sometimes if I have a power fluctuation & have to restart, chrome asks if I want to restore tabs.

Good luck!

[walkingman]

3. It would help to know what "disappeared"...application or browser or whatever.

[House of Roberts]

4. Lenovo desktop computer, running Chrome and

I had a file explorer open and a number of pages. I looked in the recently closed files and none of them were there. It’s like I hid them.

[walkingman]

6. You could try this - it might show the files that you had open in explorer?

Press Win+R, type shell:recent and hit Enter to open

[House of Roberts]

9. Let me add this:

Looking in the Chrome menu on the right side with the three dots, I see in the list ‘Person 1’, Not signed in (well I never have used this linking or network feature). In a menu that shows with my cursor on it, an option says x Close this profile (10 windows). This also leads me to believe my screen has hidden maybe my profile but the windows are there somewhere.

[walkingman]

10. If you have multiple profiles in Chrome browser try switching...

On your computer, open Chrome.
At the top right, select Profile
Choose the profile you want to switch to.

Or maybe you inadvertently switched computer profiles?
Ctrl+Shift+M, then arrow keys to select, and Enter. (Esc to go back)

[House of Roberts]

11. I hit Ctrl+Shift+ and I get the same menu as

the one under the profile icon upper right. It’s also the same options as Person 1 in the three dot menu, but that one has the option to close the profile, which I’m afraid to do without getting the profile back first.
Apparently this is where I’m stuck.
The hidden profile appears to not exist. I am the only profile visible and yet the computer knows there are 10 windows open (somewhere).

[walkingman]

12. I normally use firefox for my browser but I opened chrome to see if I could see

your issues....If you click on your profile pic and then choose manage profiles - it will show all of your profiles....in my case it listed me as "person 1" which is normal. Any other profiles would be listed there.

I suspect it is not a profile issue causing your problem. As mentioned earlier you might just have inadvertantly shutdown the browser and lost your stuff (if you are talking about your browser stuff only). I assume your already tried the "Ctrl+Shift+T" to see your last session?

As far as explorer - did you try the shell command? and if you did it should show you all your recently opened files.

[House of Roberts]

13. I finally forced a shutdown

after scouring History back a couple of days and opening everything my memory could recognize, then bookmarked it all into a designated folder so it would be safe. It finally came back up and Chrome had a restore pages option so I clicked it and it all came back!
Thanks for all of your help. I still don’t know what keys I hit to start with.

[walkingman]

14. Good for you - stuff happens. It has happened to everyone, so don't feel like the "Lone Ranger" ☮

[Tasmanian Devil]

15. I'm not a windows person

I've no clue, so I asked Claude about what you saw. It said this about 'hiding all open windows'. You might have hit window-d ....

Native Windows options:

Minimize all windows: Right-click on the taskbar and select "Show the desktop" or use the keyboard shortcut Win + D. This minimizes all open windows at once, though it's not quite the same as hiding.

Pressing Win + D toggles between showing the desktop and restoring all your minimized windows back to their previous state. So if you've minimized everything with Win + D, hitting it again will bring all those windows back.

[canetoad]

5. Some user errors

You just need to grin and bear. This might be one of them.

Depending on your computer, have a look in 'Start' for 'Recent Items' - you might find them there. If the keys you hit actually shut the programs down, you've probably lost any unsaved work. Unfortunately this may be a learning experiencee.