How to recover lost data on Windows 10

Help me out here!

I'm running Windows 10 and something really weird just happened—I plugged in a USB drive and my computer just straight up died on me. When I tried to log back in, it was actually asking for a password, which is totally not how it usually works...

So, after I finally got back in (I had to reset my password because I couldn't remember the old one), I got hit with this error: "The user profile service failed the sign-in. User profile cannot be loaded."
I managed to find a tutorial online—https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge...d-sign-solved/
I followed all the steps, and while Windows eventually booted up, it’s like the whole thing did a factory reset or something. My personal files are just... gone. They aren't anywhere!

Can anyone please tell me how I can get my private files back onto this computer? 🙏

Honestly, it’d make way more sense if they were sitting on a different partition or a separate drive just to dodge this kind of headache.
Check if there are any other user profiles tucked away in C :/ Users, then try digging through those for your files..

Maybe take a quick peek at the Windows.old folder over on your C :/ Users drive...

Exactly... for instance, all my data from the "old desktop" is sitting under the "Users-ASUS" folder (even though I searched everywhere before and couldn't find a trace of it).
What’s actually the smartest move here if I want to revert back to the old setup and just have one single "user account" to deal with?

Also, does anyone know how I can get my favorites back in Firefox?

Thanks, guys 🙂

Wait, how on earth did you even manage to log in if you couldn't remember your password—did you just change it after the fact or something?