About two years ago, I started to notice entire folders were sometimes mysteriously disappearing from my albums folder, which was at that time stored on a 300 GB Maxtor SATA hard drive. I thought it might have had to do with the fact that the drive was resting exposed in the case and the machine was resting next to a giant cathode ray television that I have since donated to a former housemate. I decided to move the computer and start using a different drive for primary storage, while retaining this one for short term scratch space. Just today I searched for a song I remembered having but couldn't find in the proper place, and found it in a hidden folder called 'found.000'. Apparently Windows was good enough to locate 4.6 gigs of files and folders and store them, but couldn't be bothered to tell me about it.
Now that these files are back (a huge win in some cases), I am going to begin the slow work of repatriating them to the albums folder. So as not to clog the newly added albums list with these files that are not really new, I will log them in a different list. w00t!