I was manipulating some images with the MonoGame Content Pipeline Tool and found that I had to reload all of the images, so I deleted the folder in the tool. However, instead of simply deleting the images I had already stored, months of source code development along with my entire project solution was suddenly erased from the Earth.
I have looked all over my hard drive thinking that somehow my files got relocated but they are nowhere to be found, including in the recycle bin.
What happened??? Does anyone have an answer for this?
First, very important, do what MrValentine says. In the past I used recuva to recover some family members’ computer deleted files, but any of the tools here should work:
The problem is probably caused by this issue:
which was fixed some time ago, but wasn’t introduced until 3.7 . So actually every user of 3.6 and previous versions are subject to wiping their hard disk because of a single mistake.
I used two recovery tools (including Recuva) and neither was able to find the files the MGCB tool wiped out.
Luckily I had a back up of my entire project but it was missing several critical updates in several files, which I hadn’t backed up at that point in which I had done some very complex work.
Oh well… I’ll just have to remember what I did.
At least this was a known flaw and I am not the first to experience this. However, how was the MGCB tool developed so that it would do a low-level delete of files and folders other than what was in its own content sub-directory? Why would such a tool be designed in such a fashion? That simply doesn’t make any sense.
Please don’t joke about this. It was a BIG bug. And he was lucky to have “only” the project and assets wiped, it can delete an entire drive depending on how you have your assets folders are layed out. I didn’t put “DANGEROUS” on the issue lightly, (supposing it’s the same bug and not another one).
That’s why a big recommendation to upgrade to 3.7 (or at least to the latest version of the Content Pipeline) should be in a place visible to all users. Unless you want 3.6 and previous versions users to lose their work from time to time because of a bug reported almost 2 years ago.
Thank you everyone for your replies. Though all of the recovery tools I tried, even the most extensive one I could find, could not reproduce my lost files, I am already about half way through rebuilding the lost updates.
or a VM
as a joke. That’s the problem with the smileys, they’re very open to interpretations 
As was said before, this bug is fixed in 3.7.