Bah, stupid Finder
A work colleague was trying out dragging his project folder into the area beside trash so he could right-click and access files more quickly. He accidentally dropped the folder into the trash so he immediately went into the trash folder and dragged it back out. However, he then found that all the folders from the letter 's' down were gone. He hadn't emptied trash or anything, they just disappeared.
I looked in all the usual places to see if they were anywhere to be found but they were gone. It's as if the Finder just removed them during the move process. The only thing I can think of is that there was a corrupt file or directory in there somewhere that would cause that.
The work is important and fortunately there is a backup but it is a couple of weeks old so at the moment I'm using Data Rescue to see if I can get anything back. I'll try Disk Utility afterwards to see if the disk database needs a repair but I've never seen this sort of thing happen before. I've seen corrupted directories before but I've never seen the Finder just remove files without an error or warning. It's very disconcerting.
This is on an Intel iMac running 10.4.7. If anyone has seen this sort of thing before, any suggestions would be welcome. I just want to make sure it won't happen again. I was thinking about installing a program to monitor trash but the trash wasn't actually emptied so I don't even think that would help.
edit: Data Rescue didn't really work very well. It recovered quite a lot of files but hardly any were usable. It took nearly 1.5 hours to run. I ran Disk Utility afterwards and it came up with the error that comes from installing CS2, which I quickly repaired. I've heard that it can mess up an filesystem so I'm wondering if that maybe caused the issue. Time Machine can't come soon enough if you ask me.
I looked in all the usual places to see if they were anywhere to be found but they were gone. It's as if the Finder just removed them during the move process. The only thing I can think of is that there was a corrupt file or directory in there somewhere that would cause that.
The work is important and fortunately there is a backup but it is a couple of weeks old so at the moment I'm using Data Rescue to see if I can get anything back. I'll try Disk Utility afterwards to see if the disk database needs a repair but I've never seen this sort of thing happen before. I've seen corrupted directories before but I've never seen the Finder just remove files without an error or warning. It's very disconcerting.
This is on an Intel iMac running 10.4.7. If anyone has seen this sort of thing before, any suggestions would be welcome. I just want to make sure it won't happen again. I was thinking about installing a program to monitor trash but the trash wasn't actually emptied so I don't even think that would help.
edit: Data Rescue didn't really work very well. It recovered quite a lot of files but hardly any were usable. It took nearly 1.5 hours to run. I ran Disk Utility afterwards and it came up with the error that comes from installing CS2, which I quickly repaired. I've heard that it can mess up an filesystem so I'm wondering if that maybe caused the issue. Time Machine can't come soon enough if you ask me.
Comments
MacOSX doesn't have the Windows XP requirement to delete files that are too big.
Also the trash resides in a hidden folder inside the main hardrive .trash I believe. (yes it's really just another folder)
I would of tried to terminal it to see if it's hidden or something.
That's very weird. It shouldn't disappear without deleting trash.
MacOSX doesn't have the Windows XP requirement to delete files that are too big.
Also the trash resides in a hidden folder inside the main hardrive .trash I believe. (yes it's really just another folder)
I would of tried to terminal it to see if it's hidden or something.
That's the first thing I tried. I even rebuilt the locate database to see if the files were anywhere on the system but it found absolutely nothing.
The files have been copied from the backup now so really only one or two projects were lost.