MacOS Sonoma - Files missing on ExFat Drive

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Filet-o-Fish Author

Level 1

16 points

MacOS Sonoma - Files missing on ExFat Drive

Posting this "out there' just in case other people have issues.

We keep an agnostic raided library drive (formatted ExFat) of various masters, templates, etc. in our office.

The other day I went looking for a file in the usual folder and the folder was not there.

First thought was accidental click drag one folder

into another (it happens).

Searched the drive, nothing from that folder was there.

Was it deleted?

That's when I noticed dozens of folders were missing

and many more were empty.

Got that sick feeling in my stomach.

Ok. Calm down. What changed?

Sonoma. That's the only thing between yesterday and today.

Ran disk utility...says the drive was fine.

Good. But not good.

Tried running Disk Warrior.

Can't run it on ExFat. Grrrr.

Noticed our Softraid utility had a recent upgrade for Sonoma...but it won't open.

Contact Softrraid who said "that's not your issue, but here's a beta version of the app that will run on your system"

They were right. Beta opened but didn't fix the issue.

They suggested Disk Warrior. Grrr.

Panic setting in.

Google search : try lots of Terminal commands

fsck, sudo, ls -l , chmod 755...

ran into permission issues and invalid argument errors

Restarted in Single user mode - nope, no commands to fix it worked - didn't see the drive.

My partner did some research which showed success mounting it on window systems

So she suggested I try using her system which hadn't gone to Sonoma.

I had my doubts.

Why would Sonoma not see files but Ventura would?

Mounted the drive and.... TA DA!

All the files and folders were there.

Going to make a safety backup of this drive

and then reformat as Mac-RAID and use Windows utilities to mount on other systems.

But thought I'd post this in case this helps someone else out there.

Mac Pro

Posted on Oct 2, 2023 9:10 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 3, 2024 8:41 PM in response to Filet-o-Fish

Just had this happen to a 14TB ExFat external drive. When I had more than 7TB on it, it went dark. I plugged it into a Mac that still had Ventura and the data was back, but it said it was now corrupted and could only be backed up. So, I bought an 8TB drive to save what I could thinking it would all be lost. It took 3 days to load all 7TB of files onto the new drive. I took it back to the Sonoma machine and the NEW drive was lost, too. It wouldn't show up at all on Sonoma after I had it up to 7TB full. I don't know the exact level, but it worked fine with small amounts of data on it. I reformatted the original 14TB drive to APFS instead of ExFat. Now I have to transfer all my data back to the 14TB from the backup 8TB I had in ExFat that went dark also. I'll only use APFS from now on for my Mac computers I guess.

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Answer 2

Filet-o-Fish Author

Level 1

16 points

Oct 2, 2023 4:32 PM in response to HWTech

While I have already begun the process of migrating the drive to HFS, I will try your suggestion of isolating the drive. That said, the only external drive I have connected is a NAS - so it's unlikely to be a conflict amongst external drives.

Haven't had any issues with Softraid. The irony is we don't need Softraid anymore since going to the NAS workflow. So I'm likely to create my HFS raid using Disk Utility so I'm not beholden to Softraid any longer.

While I appreciate the caution of going to Sonoma, I'm not sure the external drive installation would have raised a red flag in time for me to discover the MIA files and folders. Truth is every system we have is critical. There's no spare "try me here first" system we can work bugs out on.

My partner would have advised I wait a while for Sonoma to work out bugs and that is more than true. I leapt faster than I should have, perhaps. But it wasn't a company-wide sweep of upgrades. I was the guinea pig. I alone took the risk. And in the end it didn't affect the drive (thank the heavens).

I honestly wasn't posting for a solution. The purpose of my post was to alert Apple and any other users of what a potential, and rather odd, issue is and maybe help someone else avoid a total panic induced meltdown.

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Answer 3

HWTech

Level 9

55,132 points

Oct 2, 2023 2:19 PM in response to Filet-o-Fish

Try disconnecting all other external devices in case one of them is causing a problem. I know on the Apple Silicon Macs that mounting an external drive when a Wacom tablet was already connected would cause a similar problem where some items could be seen on an external volume, but others files/folders could not be seen.

My boss has used SoftRAID in the past, but I recently found out he has given up on it due to issues, not sure exactly what issues he had with it (he had used it for years).

It is always best to test out any upgrades before installing them on any critical production systems. If you don't have a spare computer for testing, then install macOS to an external drive & migrate everything to it so you can then try the upgrade on the external drive. This is still a bit risky in case you select the wrong drive to upgrade, macOS does something weird, or the system firmware update causes a problem since it is not possible to downgrade system firmware. The 2018+ Mac may have more issues with this process than older Macs without the security enclave chips.

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Answer 4

Oct 25, 2023 8:16 AM in response to Filet-o-Fish

I'm not using a RAID so don't have an answer for that. But what I do know is that Sonoma has not been mounting my external hard drives (mechanical) that were formatted exFAT. Had to use EaseUS software to copy files from the unmounted drive.

Will be switching all my drives to APFS.

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