Older Android Files Not Showing On PC.

[JGupton93]

Never had issues transferring files from my phone to PC until this morning when I noticed a lot of my files were showing as empty. My phone is full of pictures & music yet my DCIM & Music Folders are empty. The odd part is that my download folder is also empty but if I were to download something now it'll show up as the only file yet it won't show the ones that are already there. So it appears as if my PC erased my phones data yet everything still shows up in my phones system folders. I've looked everywhere for solutions but everyone just says make sure MTP is enabled, which was the first thing I did. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Hadron]

It doesn't sound like your PC has erased anything: if it had you'd not be able to see the files on the phone either. Rather it sounds like your PC hasn't connected properly to the phone (for reason unknown).

I assume you've tried disconnecting and reconnecting, rebooting phone, rebooting PC. How about a different USB socket or different cable? I can't really explain this, so these are just generic guesses.

 

[KBU2]

Can the files be viewed on the device itself Under hidden Systems files? If so you may need to copy and paste those files into a readable location in the device.

 

[psionandy]

Are these files on an SD card by any chance?

(SD cards can go bad... and there are a lot of 'fake ones' which look like the files are there, but then don't really store them.. and you don't realise until you try and recover the older files...)

 

[svim]

What phone do you have and which version of Android is it running, and which operating system is running on your computer? If it's Windows or Mac, neither have very good support for non-native file systems so you always need to allow for the fact that viewing any Android device using either Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder will always have significant limitations. But that aside, it does sound like what @Hadron referred to, just some kind of volume mounting problem, probably a driver or USB-related glitch. A lot of things, especially involving USB auto-loading devices, can be solved by just rebooting the computer and/or your phone. If you're still having the same problem viewing files after restarting than at least you know it's not just a one-off, temporary issue.
As far as the photos and music stored on your phone, as long as you can still directly access them on your phone from your phone is one thing, whether your computer can or cannot actually access them is a completely different issue. Simply because your computer isn't able to view the contents of your phone isn't a matter of your computer deleted things, it's a problem with your computer (most likely temporary as it sounds like things were OK before but the problem just started recently). And if you want to confirm your photos and music files are still were they should be on your phone, install a file manager app from the Play Store to directly access them.