PS4 slim apps missing?

[20GT]

I have the PS4 slim I bought it new on black friday 2016

My grandson was playing BF4 and stopped to go to the bathroom. When he returned all the applications were missing. Netflix,*BF4, R6S, Black ops and every other app were no longer on the PS4 except for a couple*preinstalled apps. My drive is now back to only 34g full. The weird part is all my game saves and gallery items are still there.
Does anyone know what happened? Is my drive failing?

 

[Titan]

That is really weird. It sounds like the PS4 deleted the apps and reset itself to factory settings. But I've never heard of that happening before. Was it just you and your grandson in the house at the time? I wonder if someone else did something sinister. Perhaps a mean sibling? I wouldn't think your drive is failing. If the PS4 did reset itself, it would be a software issue. Usually when drives fail, they fail because they're mechanical. Meaning, you'd have symptoms such as a clicking noise or data corruption (which this does not sound like) or just flat out not work (so the PS4 wouldn't boot). Since all your game saves are still there, I'd say just reinstall the games. With the saves still there, you shouldn't lose any progress.

One thing you can do in the future is buy a portable USB 3.0 external hard drive and backup the PS4 hard drive periodically (every week if you are a heavy gamer, once a month or two if you play only a few hours a week or don't buy many games). You lose the games, you just plug it in and click restore and back in business after a couple hours. You would just want to make sure your saves back up to the cloud. This is done for you if you have PS+.