Today I was searching for some files on an external hard drive (a Drobo with four drives and about 16TB capacity if it makes any difference) and, while opening a folder on that drive something happened and a group of folders, 11 to be exact, that had been in the same directory as the one I was opening suddenly disappeared.
My first thought was that I had somehow accidentally selected those folders and accidentally dragged them into another folder, so I used Spotlight to search for those folder names and when that didn't find them, I opened every other folder that I could find on that drive and manually searched for them, but again found nothing. Next I opened the trash, thinking that maybe I had accidentally hit some keystroke combination, like Cmd-Delete, that would have sent them to the trash. But nothing there either. Finally, I used the Finder's "Find" to search for them and, after finding nothing using the regular search, turned on the search feature that displays invisible files and folders. That found a folder named ".trashes" that, when I opened it, contained my lost folders. I was able to move them from there back to the main directory of the hard drive and all was well. Had I not known about the invisible file search feature, which most Mac users are probably unaware of, I would never have found those lost folders, which is kind of disturbing, especially since they contained all of the photographs that our photographer had taken during 2011 (and yes, we do have a backup of those, so it wouldn't quite have been catastrophic if I had not been able to find them, but it would have required a very tedious rebuilding of catalog files that we use to organize those photos). So, a mystery for you Mac sleuths to solve: How and why did those folders disappear from their original folder? How did they end up in the invisible folder named ".trashes" and, most puzzling to me, why did they not show up when I opened the trashcan folder? Dan _______________________________________________ MacGroup mailing list [email protected] http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
