Some Safari .webloc files restored as empty files with blank icons after full Time Machine disk restore in MacOS Catalina

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Some Safari .webloc files restored as empty files with blank icons after full Time Machine disk restore in MacOS Catalina

Hello,

I had to do a full Time Machine restore of my disk due to a laptop repair process and noticed that some, but not all, of my saved Safari .webloc files now show as blank icons with the name changed to "Icon?".

If I list one of these files in Terminal it shows as having size zero, but the Get Info action in Finder shows a size of 885 KB for the specific file I am testing. This has not affected all of my .webloc files. In some directories I can have a perfectly functional .webloc file and a "corrupted" blank icon with the "Icon?" name.

Is there a way of recovering/fixing these corrupted and apparently not empty .webloc files?

Cheers,

Fernando

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Sep 23, 2020 7:12 AM

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Answer 1

Solar Sail Author

Level 1

48 points

Sep 24, 2020 4:47 AM in response to Solar Sail

Correction to my question above, after some additional investigation I came to the conclusion that these "Icon?" files are not "corrupted" .webloc files at all.

These actually seem to be previously hidden Resource Files that were created when I customised folders with non-default images. In some customised directories these "Icon?" files still have their hidden flag attribute set and are therefore invisible in the Finder. This can be easily checked by running the ls -laO [filename] command in the terminal.

The solution/workaround to address the now visible "Icon?" files is to hide them again using the chflags hidden [filename] command in the terminal. A quick find command can be created to search for all "Icon?" files with their hidden attribute not set and then use the chflags command to hide them back again.

This is a minor issue, but it seems Time Machine is not backing (or restoring) all file attributes/flags for some of these files...

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Some Safari .webloc files restored as empty files with blank icons after full Time Machine disk restore in MacOS Catalina

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