Windows – Favorites disappeared in windows 8

favoriteswindows 8windows-explorer

The favorite links on the left side of all the folders have disappeared on my computer.
Normally I had links to Downloads, Desktop and some more. But one day, they were all gone. And I can't find a way to get them back. Why doesn't it work by right click on it and press "Restore favorite links" (translated from swedish, don't know the uk/us name)

Image of how it looks like now

I think they may have disappeared becaused I removed a folder called "My links" in the "Alfred" folder. But it is weird because I haven't touched the "favorites" folder.

I have tried a lot to get it to work but with no luck.

Best Answer

Ordinarily, Restore favorite links should have worked; that's what it's there for. I just deleted the Links folder in Win7, then used that same option to regenerate them so Favorites was restored back to default.

At this point IMO you have two options:

  1. Create a new temporary user profile (or use an existing separate profile) and copy a working Links folder over to your profile. Naturally, custom items you previously added will not be restored.

  2. Since Links is just an ordinary folder with a hidden+system Dekstop.ini that's responsible for the magic, you could simply create a new folder by that name and copy over/recreate Dekstop.ini from a working instance of the folder (from a different profile on your or another PC). This is what it looks like on Win7, not sure if it's the same on WIn8 as I don't have access to it right now:

    [.ShellClassInfo]
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21810
[LocalizedFileNames]
RecentPlaces.lnk=@shell32.dll,-37217
Desktop.lnk=@shell32.dll,-21769
Downloads.lnk=@shell32.dll,-21798

After doing either of these Restore favorite links should work (if not, reboot and try again).

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