its gone, its all gone, HELP! My mac deleted my files

[Tas]

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

[nikkisboricua]

what version of mac *were* you using?

[Tas]

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

[kc0arf]

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

[Transient]

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)

[cscgal]

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.

[mitchy101]

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!!

[John A]

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

# ls ~/Documents

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

[Lomoco]

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!

[pleasehelpmenow]

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

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.

[DiFFeReNT]

Hello! Hopefully I can shed some light on this issue, because it just happened to an Intel Mac at work.
I'm doing this with hopes that someone may find out what happened, because I really would like to know.

2.16 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 (replaced original RAM with Corsair, 2GB, months ago)
Mac OS X 10.4.9

The Mac experienced most of the same symptoms as everyone else:

The computer had been on and being used all day with nothing unusual happening.
It was near the end of the day that the employee noticed Photoshop brushes, effects and very likely many other things completely disappear from the system. (who know what elso had also disappeared.)
The employee shut down the computer and went home.

The next morning, after turning on the computer, it went to a desktop identical to a freshly installed system user's profile.
All applications were still installed, however they did not need to be registered again (because the operating system version never changed, which apparently reacted like a Windows XP repair install and required registration). Nevertheless, in applications (Photoshop) it showed welcome settings and windows it only shows the first time after installing it.
Other user-created folders in the root directory of the hard drive were still there. The operating system version never changed.

After running Disk Utility from the OS X CD, I tried booting into safe mode (holding down shift at startup), and it gave me the following error:
http://img516.imageshack.us/my.php?image=safebooterrorxg2.jpg

That error makes it look like the bios became faulty or something...

Next I went back into OS X and looked at the user accounts, because that is obviously the main thing that got mixed up.
Prior to this incident, there was only one user: meeker.
Now, there is still only one user, however the name is: Admin, whose short name is: meeker.

Here's the GREAT news: I was snooping around the hard drive and just noticed a folder in the root directory of the drive called: Previous Systems.
Inside that were the following folders:
- meeker (which contained the missing user profile folders/data)
- Previous Systems 1 (which contained: Applications, Library, private, System, Users and a file called mach.sym - yes there were applications in the apps folder, tons of stuff in the library folder, etc)

I do not know if that Previous Systems folder was there the first time after booting up.

Thank God!! Because on the employee's desktop was THOUSANDS of dollars worth of data that hadn't been backed up yet. (yes, I scolded the employee)

Another symptom being experienced long BEFORE any of this that might be noteworthy:
Frequently when turning on the computer in the morning, instead of showing the Apple logo and loading logo it shows a Globe and just sits there. Unplugging the network cable and restarting always fixes the problem.

Hope this helps figure out the problem, because at this point I don't feel safe having the employee going back to work on that computer.

DiFFeReNT

[natnuch]

hi all, the same thing happenned to me. I have been able to locate all my old files but I don't know how to get my preferences back and (most importantly) my entourage profile with all, I have just finished getting my projects and categories all setup and now it's all gone. How do I find my old entourage pst and restore it? Is there a 'system restore' type thing in MAC similar to windows. Please help, I am a MAC newbie. Cheers,
Natnuch.

[bibobobonnor]

Are you on the right account that freaked me out once

[mike24gp]

Same thing happened to me and I know the F@#$ing stress that your going through. I did some research and I ended up using AppleXSoft File Recovery program it basically does a scan of all the deleted files on your hard drive. So you can try that, it might work for you too. there are lots of different programs out there for recovering deleted files. It does cost money for the programs but if you don't care about downloading illegally get a bit torrent and download the program that way. Peace out and good luck.

[macmad]

Stuff missing in my account and/or all my stuff missing. The common thread seems to be that you are booting off of the wrong disk, especially DiFFeReNT.The globe points to a network boot and if unavailable, it will wait. Unplugging the network cable will have it boot to the system drive. Guess what, your files are not there because you are not there! It sounds like you have a big enough shop to have tech support. Did you call them?
Tas, do you have an external drive hooked up to the system and/or several bootable partitions? OSX will not startup from a previous system folder. The previous system folder is created when you do an archive and install option. Check the date of the file and you know when and probably who installed the new system. You are going to have to run software update to get you system up to the latest version.
The archive and install option will not wipe out your user file. Simply do a search for your user name and look at the date of your previous system folder. The one you have is wrong, delete the account using the Save the home folder in a disk image and migrate the one from the previous system folder. Do not trying to copy it as it will not work. That should get you back to where you were. If it isn't, delete the user and create it again and it will ask if you want to use the disk image you created before. I still think that it is booted off of the wrong volume.
Another thing that seems to stand out is either there is only one account on the system and it is set to automatic login or someone was mucking around in accounts. People, one admin account and this is not the one you use daily! This will stop a lot of the problems you are experiencing.

[royng]

I agree with macmad. You might want to try to follow macmad advise. Do you save your files in a external disk or in your mac. Did you erase your mac data?

[royng]

If your problem is solved can you please mark the thread as solved. You can do that by going to the bottom. Thanks, i appreciate it.