My files have disappeared

Hey,
So I opened up the terminal, to try and make it so that I could see my ~/Library/ folder. It didn't work, but I started noticing that my desktop folders wouldn't have anything in them. I checked out a bunch of suggestions online, about how if you run the disk utility, and repair permissions, that would work (it didn't), and then if you ran the disk repair, that that would work (it didn't either). I've started to run out of options and I desperately need my files as I am working on a large project.
Thank you so much!

Your best option is to restore from the last backup you made before whatever you did.

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Some files have disappeared from my macbook pro.they were on the desktop and have vanished,i started to do these files again and upon restarting my macbook this morning the new files had gone.Also i can't launch any of my applications safari or app store

some files have disappeared from my macbook pro they were on the desktop.Iredid some of my work and this morning when i started up my macbook they too had vanished.Spotlight doesn't reveal them and also i can't launch any of my applications like safari app store etc, help please anyone? thanks

Restore them from your latest backup

Desktop, OneDrive, Box files have disappeared from MacBook -- yet the folders remain! How do I find the file contents?

Recently I went to my OneDrive on my 2014 MacBook Pro to get some docs, and ALL the folders were empty. (OneDrive is formerly SkyDrive.) I also use BOX. I checked the trash bins on my Mac and my OneDrive. Nothing. Then I realized that ALL my folders were empty -- including those on my desktop and in BOX. ALL my work is gone. This is a big deal...and unfortunately, I did not use Time Machine.
The whole idea of the external drive was to protect these docs. They sync with the computer -- if the computer docs disappear, so do the contents on the external drives. But regardless, anything that was IN A FOLDER is gone -- xls, PDFs, docs, etc. iTunes and pics are okay.
About a week or so before this I downloaded Picasa. Not sure if this may have had an affect on my computer.
I contacted Microsoft and they are useless. I went to the Genius bar, and they never heard of such a thing. They have moved it up but haven't heard anything from Apple. This is something that happened due to the MacBook operating system, not a virus. I've seen other similar posts where files "just disappear" but not to this extent.
I really need some help or a forensic person to figure this out. It is quite problematic. I appreciate you help mucho....
THANKS!!!!

So this seemed to result in the outcome I wanted:
- Find the old Thunderbird profile location (.../AppData/Roaming ... THunderbird/Profiles/...default/Mail/first.account.domain/Inbox
- FInd the same location on the New laptop
Copy the first (old, backup) inbox to a new file in the New profile folder; I did Inbox.bak
Start TBird - and lo and behold, I have folders "Inbox" (recent mail since the old laptop crash) and "Inbox.bak" (the mail I thought was lost).
Looks like I need to add all accounts to the New TBird first so that it creates the profiles, and after that copy the backup Inbox & Sent files to the new profile folders.
This worked for me. Not very elegant, with several manual steps, but end result is what I needed.
It would be great if there was a smoother way for disaster recovery.
And yes, I should have had better backup policy in place. For everyone's benefit - I do Data Center systems for a living, and have seen far too many "backup" services which do not actually work in a restore situation. That's why my personal backups are direct file copies on large disks. It works, but leaves room for manual error, which is what happened here.
Actual folders, btw, I keep where I see them - "c:\users\username\Thunderbird" - for this very reason.

Files have disappeared???

My daughter has a new 15" MacBook Pro. For one of her college classes she downloads ppt files and adds her own notes. She has about 12 of these on her computer and she has reviewed them regularly. Yesterday she went to look at them and she could only find 5 of them. 7 of them have disappeared. She is certain that she did not delete them. Does anyone have any ideas as to what could have happened to these files and if she can do anything to get them back. She does not have a Time Machine backup. Thanks for any help you can provide.

Rarely do files just disappear, there is a cause. If she remembers the name, she should use Spotlight (it's the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of the menu bar). Just type in the name of the file or any of its contents, and if it's on the Mac, it'll find it. If she accidentally put it in the trash, look there, because OSX doesn't empty the trash, until you tell it too (unless you set it up to automatically erase).
I'm guessing it's somewhere on the Mac. And it's time to have her set up a Time Machine backup. It is not intrusive (except for the first backup), and no files will go missing.

Imovie 4 Media files have disappeared!!

Hi,
A student of ours has been using IM4 to do a project, they went to do some work today and all of the files in the media folder are missing. I have hunted high and low but can not find them, has anybody had this happen to them!!!
They have been using a LACIE external HD to save their work,
Thanks,

What Karl writes is very true about the corruption issues with iMovie 4.
I work at a high school (as well as independently) with many, many projects on iMovie versions 2 through HD (and also FCP). We mainly still use iMovie 2 because of bugs and slowness (lag time after clicking e.g.) with the other versions. When we want to do sound work and put Ken Burns effects on stills, and also to create DVDs then we bump up to 4.
Today, for the second time this year, all the clips have disappeared from a media folder but this time from a project done in iMovie 2. It was the last project open before shut down yesterday, and it was the first project opened on startup today. Nobody accessed the folders to delete them and neither iMovie or finder trash were used.
The clips simply disappeared.
Like I said before, this is the second time this year this has happened and it is very frustrating to us and the students.
We run into many issues weekly due to the intense usage of the editing programs (such as strange quirks with the Ken Burns effect and random corruption of stills).
And we have quite a few workarounds built into our workflow to deal with these things, but have found no way to restore the disappearing clips. And outside of copying every folder to another location every day, I can't think of what would really safeguard us for this one. This is a very scary problem to have.
I'm pretty much editing on FCP five or six hours a day and while it is way, way more stable, there are certain things that crop up there too.
It would be nice if Apple would start a page on known troubles and fixes that could be accessed easily from the specific product's support home page.

Certain files have disappeared from my computer, certain file types remain, and the folders remain. What happened to the files, any way to get them back?

First I'll give my specs:
MacBook Pro mid-2009
Memory: 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB
Software: OS X 10.9.4 (13E28)
This evening I woke my computer up and the first thing I noticed was the background image had changed.
Then navigating through my folders, all files have been removed except for *some" of the following file types:
Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, CeltX, Final Draft, InDesign.
Files I know were there this morning and are no longer there are: PDF, MOV, TXT, and others.
When I "get info" on one of the folders that used to be populated with files, the first file size that shows is the original (i.e. 2.3 gigs) but it quickly updates to the new size of an empty folder (6 mb).
I have checked to make sure I am still logged in as the correct user, I have reset the PRAM, I have reindexed finder, I have verified and repaired the disk and verified disk permissions. I have used Terminal to show all hidden files, and none of these things have helped.
No, I do not have a backup that I can restore from. Yes, I know it is stupid.
Any insight or suggestions are welcome.
Thank you!

Try booting into the Safe Mode using your normal account. Disconnect all peripherals except those needed for the test. Shut down the computer and then power it back up after waiting 10 seconds. Immediately after hearing the startup chime, hold down the shift key and continue to hold it until the gray Apple icon and a progress bar appear. The boot up is significantly slower than normal. This will reset some caches, forces a directory check, and disables all startup and login items, among other things. When you reboot normally, the initial reboot may be slower than normal. If the system operates normally, there may be 3rd party applications which are causing a problem. Try deleting/disabling the third party applications after a restart by using the application un-installer. For each disable/delete, you will need to restart if you don't do them all at once.
Safe Mode - Mavericks
Safe Mode - About

My archive files have disappeared after re-installation.

I recently re-installed Thunderbird, only to find that while my four years of archives are shown on the left panel, the relevant years are EMPTY. Current archiving works fine, but I'm unable to access my previous FOUR YEARS of archives. How is this possible? What happened? And is there some way to retrieve the missing files? If not, this is very bad news for Thunderbird. I've used Thunderbird for ten years or more and nothing like this happened before. PLEASE ADVISE WHAT CAUSED THIS AND IF IT CAN BE REVERSED.
Thank you.

Hi Matt:
Thanks for your suggestion, but PROPERTIES shows all files have 0 content. Tried REPAIR, but folders remain blank. How on earth did this happen, I wonder? Archive files for 2012, 2013 and 2014 (except for two recent saves) all empty....
So it goes .....Will be more careful in future and save important files to hard disk .....
wordsmyth

Photos appear in iPhoto, but original files have disappeared. Anything I can do to recover them?

What it says in the topic. Specifically, I sorted through and deleted roughly 90% of the photos of a particular event, saving out the 10% I wanted to keep, before emptying the iPhoto trash. I then selected "File>Reveal in Finder>Original Files" in order to move the files to a centralized folder in which I keep the master files from every month. Mind you, I have gone through this process multiple times before and it has worked as expected. This time, however, when I used the "reveal in Finder" feature the finder window I already had open appeared, but nothing else happened. After some manual searching I found that all of the original files for the photos I had deleted from that event were still there, but the files for the photos I hadn't deleted were nowhere to be found (the opposite of what I did in iPhoto and what the library there actually shows). I have tried exporting the desired photos, but I only get a prompt saying that the original files cannot be found; I also cannot individually select any of the photos (only a giant triangle with an exclamation mark in it pops up) despite that all of the thumbnails are still there. Can anyone tell me what's going on or if there's anything I can do, or have I simply lost these photos forever?

in order to move the files to a centralized folder i
That's the problem. If you moved them rather than copy them to the other folder they were removed from the library and you're getting what's expected. In the future select the photos you want to store in the other folder and use the File ➙ Export ➙ File Export menu option with the Kind = Original selected. That avoids this kind of error.
Have you emptied the Trash bin in the Dock? With iPhoto 9 and later image files are moved to the Trash bin in the Dock when the Trash bin in iPhoto is emptied. If they are there you'll have to import them again into iPhoto and then delete the problem ones from the original event.
Rather than

All my files have disappeared!

Hi!
So the situation is pretty simple. Just really bizarre.
I was using my iMac for a few hours then started doing something else nearby for a an hour or two then when I got back to my mac I noticed there wasn't anything on my desktop anymore. Nor in my documents. Or photos folder. Or videos folder.
(like literally no files at all, when I go to All My Files, nothing comes up. That's how much there is nothing on my mac right now.
The system preferences are all still there. And all my applications.
So I rebooted.
On reboot I was asked to sign into my apple ID. It was exactly the same screen as when you setup a new mac. With the little mac screen that appears and then the ticks and then it says "ready to use your mac" or something like that.
Then once I was logged in the dock was reset to default and there still isn't anything on my desktop, documents, photos or videos folders.
Apps stills there though.
What on earth is going on?
What I've done so far:
-Checked that I've logged in as myself (admin): And I have.
-Checked space: Looks like all my space has returned...which is worrying I guess.
-Checked the other users: there are no other users. Just Guest User.
I was in near my mac at the time, but wasn't using it.
Thanks in advance,
Arnaud

No. I have only ever had my user (admin).
I have Find My Mac and iCloud. But I haven't logged into it for a very long time.
Also, when you remote erase, can you select parts of you drive? Because not everything has gone.
I always though remote erasing cleaned the entire drive.
Applications are still there. And the library and system folders seem to be untouched.

Just upgraded storage and most of my numbers files have disappeared from iCloud, help!

I just purchased the additional storage for my iCloud account. And when I went to iCould.com today, my spreadsheets are gone. There is only one (of about 8) remaining, and it is an old version from May. Please help, I need these files!

As long as you save your documents to iCloud, those documents can only be accessed from there and that requires an internet connection.
Sorry this is NOT true.
You can access your iCloud documents when you are not online because they are stored on your computer.
So if you have time machine you can get back all your lost files.
Click the GO menu and press alt/option key to reveal the hidden Library folder.
Find the MOBILE DOCUMENTS folder and open.
All your iCloud documents from Numbers etc are stored in here.
They will probably be missing because they sync with the cloud.
Start up Time maching and scroll back to a date before all your files went missing and they will appear.
Restore the files.

Help - My music files have disappeared

I needed to move my iTunes library from one external drive to another and I followed the instructions in iTunes Help. I used the Edit/Preferences/Advanced to change the location of my iTunes Music folder and then started the File/Library/Consolidate Library to copy all my music from the old drive to the new one. After running about 20 minutes, I got an error message stating "Copying music failed. The required file could not be found" I opened up the music folder on the old drive and discovered that all folders for artists and albums were there but over 90% of the music files were gone. There had been over 3000 songs on that drive and only 235 were still there. On the new drive, only 160 files showed up. Where did the other 2800 music files go? They are not in the recycle bin and I cannot find them anywhere else on my PC using the Search tool in Windows Explorer. What do I do now?

Apparently the old external drive is going bad. I turned it off and waited an hour or so and restarted it, and all my files were back. I have copied them to my PC hard drive to be safe. However, my iTunes is now totally screwed up. Although the music files are back where they were (for now), iTunes cannot find any songs except the few that were copied to the new drive when I did the consolidate. I tried the Consolidate Library again and it stops because it cannot find the files. Am I going to have to point iTunes to the location of every song, one at a time, for over 2800 songs?

In Finder, I try to open a folder and files have disappeared and Finder closes. How do I fix it?

Firefox crashed while I was online. It sent an error message. After, I was unable to locate the files in one of my folders in Finder. I can see the folders in "documents" but don't know how to restore them in Finder. I don't know if any other damage was caused. Thank you.

In Mac OS X v10.7 and later, the $HOME/Library folder is a hidden folder.
Open Finder and use one of these:
*Go > Go To Folder (Shift-Command-G) and in the dialog type: ~/Library
*Open the "Go" menu and hold down the Option key to make the Library appear
*http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/909/cpsid_90947.html Access hidden user library files

All my spreadsheets in numbers and files in pages have disappeared! Does anyone know how I can find them / get them back?

I had a substantial amount of spreadsheets on my iPad mini and the numbers app as well as a substantial number of pages documents in the pages app. The key word there was had! All my files have disappeared. And on top of that every time I go into preferences to turn on the cloud option it keeps turning itself off. Does anybody know what is going on I would love to have my documents back please help.

I suppose you have checked the following settings:
1. Settings>Pages>Use iCloud>On
2. Settings>iCloud>Documents and Data>On

WHY CAN'T I IMPORT PICTURES? MY PREVIOUS PICTURES HAVE DISAPPEARED

I can't import pictures into lightroom. All previous images (apart from some in an old file) have disappeared. Do I need to reinstall lightroom. Yesterday I had a
'reading cache' problem and lightroom wouldn't open at all. The community advised me to remove a file (ending with LRData) which I did but now I don't seem to have
and photographs. I'm just learning and this is very frustrating.

Removing the .lrdata file should not interfere with your picture files, that is where the preview files are stored. When you open Lightroom after removing this file Lightroom should realize it does not exist a recreate a new one. Your Lightroom sub-folder that contains the Catalog File and your Previews file should look like the screen capture below.
Try shutting down your computer and reboot, then start Lightroom.

I get error message: "An error occurred with the publication of album...Authentication with server failed...whenever I open a facebook file in my iPhoto. In each file, most of my photos have disappeared. What do I need to do?

I get error message: "An error occurred with the publication of album...Authentication with server failed. Please check your login and password information" whenever I open a facebook file in my iPhoto. In each file, most of my photos have disappeared. I am hoping I can retrieve these "lost" files. What do I need to do?

Message was edited by: leroydouglas
better yet, try this solution:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/12351186#12351186

My files have disappeared

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