Files dont show up

[Ichoumaz]

Hello, i have a small issue with my USB, it was all good, then last week, i plugged it into my university's computer, and now i cant see my files, when i open file explorer, i see that the files are still there and occupying the space, but when i go into the drive itself , i cant find the files at all, is there a way to recover the files or are they gone forever? these are all the files that i find on my usb, there used to be sorta like a shortcut inside the usb itself that says sandisk, but now its gone

[Bombastinator]

By USB you mean USB thumb drive.  There are several ways files are listed and described depending on the FS being used by the drive.  Thumb drives used to generally have fat32 as an FS.  That was a while ago.  I do not know what the standard is currently much less what you have.  It’s possible the tables for the files are there but the files aren’t.  Or visa versa.  You need to find out what the file system type for the drive is and go hunting based on that.  Files might still be there.

[Ichoumaz]

22 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

By USB you mean USB thumb drive.  There are several ways files are listed and described depending on the FS being used by the drive.  Thumb drives used to generally have fat32 as an FS.  That was a while ago.  I do not know what the standard is currently much less what you have.  It’s possible the tables for the files are there but the files aren’t.  Or visa versa.  You need to find out what the file system type for the drive is and go hunting based on that.  Files might still be there.

solved it, for some reason when i plugged them into that university computer, it unabled the hide files function on them, so i just enabled "show hidden files" and they reappeared. like magic