Disk Cleaning Applications Caused Data Loss on My Windows Computer?

One fine Sunday morning, I was working on my Windows operating system-based computer and could not log onto my user account. Though, I am not the professional or expert, but I generally do quite well with computers. I thought, there is some problem with Windows registry or unusual files on the drive. To fix this problem and improve the performance of my system, I ran third-party registry and disk cleaner tool on Windows hard drive by running my system in Safe Mode and selecting to include the 'Document and Settings' in searched directories. The results were quite horrible. All of my valuable data is gone and it was time to think of Windows Data Recovery to retrieve lost data.

My user account was hosed and the start menu was also empty. I preformed system restore 2 days back that seemed to be successful. The restore operation was not expected to restore my personal data, it was just done to restore the system files. Even after restore the operating system, start menu items are missing. All the original applications are still in Program Files folder, but Start menu is empty.

I used to use the disk cleaning application to remove temporary Internet files and everything else that is checked by default. I thought the application would remove only faulty registry entries and unused files in the My Documents folder, not all the data.

After some research on Internet, I found that the disk cleaning applications doesn't scan only for the junk files such as other programs, they have a list of the storage location of the files explicitly, by adding the 'Document and Settings' to include list in folder to remove, it has been removed.

In such cases of critical data loss situations, I had only one option to go and that was to restore data from backup. But unfortunately the backup was not updated and most of my significant data were not in the backup file. Then I came to know that applications are available to