Hi, I have no idea if this has happened to you before or not but it just happened to me and I am hoping to God one of you brilliant friendly people can help me. I shut down my mac and when I started it up again all the files I had saved, all my music, all my photo's and numbers and adresses and everything else I have worked on in the last year has just gone. No trace of it. If any of you have any idea how to get it back, I would love to know. Also, all the applications are still there but some of them need to be registered again.
Thanks

what version of mac *were* you using?

I was using Firefox version 10.3.5 and now it has reverted back to 10.3.3

Hi Tas,

Yep, in order to help you out, we need to know what OS you were working with, and where these images are stored. It would also be a good idea to locate your backup materials.

Where did you get Firefox as 10.3.5 / 3.3? Firefox is a web browser; OS X is an operating system.

What did you do before you lost the files? How did you access them in the past?

Christian

I have to say this really sounds like you've booted into a different startup disk. Either that or someone's come along and done a fresh install on your system . I can't see any other explanations for the symptoms you describe. ( I'm assuming you meant OS X 10.3.5 rather than firefox)

I agree with both of your theories, Transient. Shutting down an OS X 10.3.5 machine with lots of files and starting up a 10.3.3 machine with a clean slate seems mighty fishy. If there really is corrupt data, I would check out using Disk Warrior, but it seems that Transient's theory sounds right on the money.

Hi, i have had the same problem i am running Mac OS X 10.4 and when i started up my machine msn came up asking to reinstall, so i installed and but i had to restart due to something about keychain, however when i reatared everything was set to default (mouse settings ect) also i had to register all my programs again, but when i went to look for my files they are gone, they are on the HDD still because alot of space has been used, how can i recover these files. Thanks but please HELP!!

Try changing view modes in the Finder window. Often files can be hidden out of view in Icon view, so try Column or List view.

Another thing you may want to try is using the Terminal to list the contents of the directory. Start Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, and then try entering something like
etc., where ~ is your home directory.

Oh and try following the suggestions previously made in this thread, such as checking your startup disk. Make sure there's no CDs in the drive when your computer starts up.

Hope this helps

Did you download anything before you shut-down your computer? You may have downloaded a mac virus (sounds impossible). They can be made! You just take automator and tell it to delete everything except the apps. Hope you solve It!

Hallo. Have you solved your problem? I had a similar thing happen to me a week ago. My files didn't get deleted, but my itunes library got deleted, and all the settings for all apps, as well as system preference settings. a week ago i just decided to go ahead, and re-install and re-do everything, and i've almost updated everything back to normal, but i'm still curious if there's a way i can get my old settings etc. back. i've saved all my current settings and files onto my external hd, so if i have to revert back to 2 weeks ago my work will be saved and i can just upload everything again. my old os was a os x, and i'm not sure what version. but now my os is os x 10.4. i had another user logon to a user profile, and it thoguht maybe that was why everythign went screwy, but all the user did was change password. but the next morning when i turned it on again, bam everything erased, just like ur incident. i'd like to know how u solved ur problem if u did or if u didn't, maybe we cna work together!

whats weird also is that i did about 8 pages of writing on powerpoint 4 days ago, and now when i checked, all the data is gone. is there some tmp. files database like pc has on mac? any of u genius people know?

wew mac is awsum. but DAMN.