Missing Files on External Drives
Hello, I'm a little perplexed trying to figure out what is happening here. I've noticed when I use external drives on my new M1 Macbook Pro, folders of footage inexplicably go missing. I work as a video editor so I will have confirmation and checksums to verify that the video footage was properly transferred to said external drive. However after opening the drive on my. new M1 macbook pro, the folders are empty. This has now happened on more than one occasion with hundreds of Gbs of footage, it seems doubtful to me that it could even delete this much footage so quickly without me noticing... and yet it's gone.
I'm afraid to plug anything into this computer at this point, thankfully the projects effected all had physical back ups, but I would really like to understand what is going on here.
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.2