perfmon.exe is a Microsoft Windows tool that allows users to create data reports regarding process resource usage.

During a user defined data collection set, you can specify where to save the resulting report. I tend to save things to my desktop for ease-of-access. Welp, turns out this was a bad idea.

Part of the software is to archive and even delete previous reports every so often. I guess this is for saving space if one wishes to run reports regularly.

Unfortunately, the software doesn’t actually check whether the files it archives and removes are data reports that had been previously generated. In fact, it just removes any files whatsoever, without warning.

After saving the data report to my desktop, I noticed that it affected other folders on the desktop – ones not related to perfmon.exe at all. In each folder, the files had been archived into .cab files. And for much older folders, the files were deleted altogether.

Microsoft needs to address this issue by only removing past data reports only and not just blindly removing files. Or at a minimum, warn the user that the directory is assumed to only contain data reports.

This was a strange occurrence for me, and took a while to retrace what had happened, so I decided to write this up in case others run into this issue.