Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

cognus

macrumors member
Original poster
May 1, 2012
75
2
Texas
Friends I'm just looking for clues & Ideas here to see if I have missed any steps in trying to decipher "what happened" in the loss of some files. This is on an iMAC, wherein we installed a new SSD back in March, loading High Sierra from "scratch" using a USB installer, and it runs really well. Very clean, lightly used by an older gentleman who basically was doing mail and stashing a few business files, all on the desktop, with each business account in a separate folder. Documents, no pictures.

At some point supposedly in the last 3 to 4 weeks, the files on the desktop vanished without a proverbial trace. All the usual checks have been made to see if they landed in trash bin or elsewhere, and finally resorted to running UFS Explorer [which I heartily recommend for serious searches] to see if the fragments existed in RAW form or elsewhere. No success there although I'm not sure that the search function for specific file names or types was rendering good results. At any rate, recovery is not my question. WHAT HAPPENED is my question.
I am totally mystified.
I opened up the log files and went through a number of them from around the time of the incident, and there was just nothing remarkable or unusual at all. Just ordinary bland reporting of normal events we expect in macos or other operating systems. The drive checks out perfectly healthy and there are no signs I can find of any unexpected crashes.

From searching around the web, this is not an isolated case. There are many. Nowhere in a quick review of other cases did I get the sense of a resolution or eureka finding - no enlightenment at all.

Suggestions? Seen this before?
 

cognus

macrumors member
Original poster
May 1, 2012
75
2
Texas
yes. extensively. What I haven't done is verify that Finder actually finds. Does it find 'hidden' files for instance, but I assume it finds anything that has not been marked as deleted. There is, and has ever been, only one user account on this.
 

hg.wells

macrumors 65816
Apr 1, 2013
1,018
728
Open Finder, in the Go To menu select home and you should see your desktop folder in there. Check to see if the content is there.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.