How to recover missing desktop files?

Question

While in Adobe Bridge, my friend accidently dragged his User folder to the Shared User folder (the graphics pen sorta grabbed it withouthim noticing). He tried to drag it back out of Shared, but it said it couldn't be modified. So he rebooted, and it started up with his own user being as if new, with none of his files or prefs. So then he tried dragging his desktop, docs folders, etc back from Shared to where they belonged in his user. That worked for everything except the Desktop. When he tried to copy that,it asked if he wanted to replace the existing (blank) desktop with the one from the shared folder, which showed all his desktop files. But when he okayed it, the resulting desktop was blank. He doesn't know if he accidently overwrote in the wrong direction (he doesn't think so), or if something else happened. He's a photographer and had hundreds of edited image files in folders on the desktop- so all his recent work since a back up a few weeks ago is gone. Spotlight cannot find any of them by name, nor any other desktop files but the new blank one. so the files are at least not visible, if not gone. Here's the thing: if you run Terminal and look at the desktop file, it shows 2,064 items... which might be his files (?). But i have no idea how to get at them. Nothing shows in the Desktop trash hidden file. Is there anything short of expensive recovery software that might find these files, which are probably not overwritten yet? (he's being careful not to use the drive so that they don't get overwritten)

Answer 1

Trying to diagnose something like this third hand probably isn't very effective. But when you open Terminal you are "in" your home directory. If you then issue this command:
cd Desktop
and hit return you will then be "in" your Desktop folder. If you then issue the list command:
ls -al
you will get a list of all the files and folders that are in the Desktop folder. If he sees everything, then the stuff is there. He could try creating a new folder in his home folder, call it something like fromDesktop, and then issue this command (this assumes he is still "in" the Desktop folder):
mv * ~/fromDesktop
This will move everything from the Desktop folder into the fromDesktop folder. A list command will verify things:
ls -al ~/fromDesktop
If all his stuff is listed, but he still can't see it in its new location using the Finder, then it could be that somehow the invisible bit got set.
And for Finder's sake, tell him to stop saving all that stuff to the Desktop! Put stuff in folders in his home folder. I've seen cases where excessive numbers of files dropped on the Desktop brought the Finder to its knees for many hours. Every single thing on the Desktop is treated as a window by the Finder, and having a ton of stuff there is needlessly slowing things down. And he should be backing up every night, not every couple of weeks. There are many programs available that will do this automatically. If he is in business he should be using one. Not to mention burning separate CDs of things for every client.
Francine
Francine
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