Files/Folders on external disk disappear from time to time

Hello rolandwartenberg!

Looks like you are having some trouble with your external drives disappearing in finder intermittently. We can absolutely see how that would be confusing and are happy to help. Are you using any adapters or hubs to connect that drive to your MacBook Pro? If so try removing them and seeing if the issue continues. Also try testing this in safe mode to see if it is related to any user settings: How to use safe mode on your Mac.

Have a great rest of your day!

rolandwartenberg wrote:

Hello,

on my system (MBP 15", 2017, macOS Catalina 10.15.7) I have the problem that folders/files on external disks (connected via USB) disappear in Finder. The files are not deleted, and after rebooting everything is back to normal (until they may disappear again), but it's a weird problem. I can see in Finder using 'Get info' for the complete disk that the content is still there, and using Terminal I can see the files/folders etc. as usual. Only Finder is showing me a complete empty disk (which is still shown as mounted and available). I have the assumption that this is related to spotlight indexing but so far did not find any information here in the support communities or in any other forum.

Regards

Roland

This can be one indication of a failing drive...

You can rebuild the spotlight index if there is some doubt—

How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

or from the Terminal.app

Spotlight not indexing all you can try the old command line ( I have not run this on Catalina to test) to Rebuild launch service, copy and paste:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain u -domain s -domain l -v

rebuild spotlight, copy & paste:

sudo mdutil -E /