Lost Folder

misskittymisskitty
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
So, I was trying to move a folder I had in the finder window to my desktop. When I put it there, *POOF* it disappears. Now, I can't find it and it had a lot of important information to me in it. Spotlight is no help, as there are apparently 6 or 7 folders with the same name, and neither is the one I'm looking for. Anyway to find this lost folder?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    If you only have 6 or 7 folders with the same name, use Spotlight to search for and open each folder to examine the contents. If you instead had hundreds or thousands of folders with the same name, I'd be concerned. This is quite easy to do.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    misskittymisskitty Posts: 51member
    What I meant was none of those folders were the right ones, and I opened all of them.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    daffy_duckdaffy_duck Posts: 248member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MissKitty View Post


    What I meant was none of those folders were the right ones, and I opened all of them.



    Did you try spotlight searching for some of the files that were in the folder?
  • Reply 4 of 5
    ipeonipeon Posts: 1,122member
    I hope this isn't the case with you, but Leopard’s Finder has a bug in its directory-moving code, leading to data loss.



    You can read more about it here:



    http://www.macintouch.com/leopard/movebug.html
  • Reply 5 of 5
    shadowshadow Posts: 373member
    Don't panic, it is extremely unlikely that the folder is lost. The data loss issue described above is about moving from one volume to another when the second one is disconnected while moving in progress. This will not happen when moving to the desktop from the same volume (and, by default, the folder will be copied when moving from another volume).



    Try the following:

    1. If you are sure you moved to the Desktop (not accidentally dropping in some other folder), open the Desktop in Finder's column view and look for your folder there. If you can not see it, create a new folder on the desktop and delete it.

    2. Try searching for a known file inside the moved folder.

    3. Open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities). Type the following (press enter after each line):



    cd Desktop

    ls -al



    Look for you folder name in the rightmost column. Note that the sorting is simple case-sensitive ASCII, so all capital letters come first.



    Edit: If your folder disappeared with a 'POOF' effect, it was in the sidebar and was not moved at all, it was removed from the sidebar. Look in it's original location. By default, in the sidebar you can see your home folder and your Documents folder (which is inside your home directory).
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