Applications disappear from App folder!

Oh roweski, you are NOT alone... me and many others on other forums have had the same thing happen, many people are astonished by the fact that it's SO random and even Apple has no idea why it happens or has any fix to it! So frustrating.

So to add my story to the ever-growing forums on this topic (I will be publishing the same text to a few other places, in the hopes Apple will post a response!)...

In our case we have 5 computers and printer on a wired network. One employee was trying to print out of InDesign CS3, and print failed. Looked in the print tray and found it had printed a "Network Configuration" sheet because it had lost the link to the network. So we of course tried to see why printer wasn't working, which is when an employee notice the question marks on some dock apps. Upon inspection of the application folder, she found ALL Adobe CS3 apps were gone, as well as Firefox and Excel. Of course we were freaked out and upon further inspection we found (as others seem to have also found) that all files accessed that day (about 14 files, Excel, Illustrator & InDesign files) were also GONE. The only other odd thing was that there were a couple folders called "Recovered Files", one on desktop and one in Trash, but upon restart, theses disappeared and what was left in Trash were about 27 files from the previous week.

We were able to restore most items via Time Machine, but as everyone has mentioned, we NEED to know WHY this happened and how to prevent it happening again. And for the record, we have NOT recently run any Apple updates. PLEASE if anyone has figured it out, let us all know. And if not, please mention what you were doing at the time or shortly before you noticed the problem. Many people have said it "sounds like a virus" but if you search this, you'll find that there are no known viruses of this sort targeting Macs.

No virus. Apparently some one trashed your apps. Who else has access to your (what ever) Mac?

Might be a symptom of not enough free space on the drive. Highlight the drive icon, then CMD-I GetInfo and see how much you have available.

No insult intended but as we used to say at work: 'the problem probably exists between the keyboard and chair'. If, as you say, the computer is used only by you and no one could have touched it, one explanation is the unintended consequences of a delete file operation when more things were selected then you thought.

Do you use an admin account for everyday use? If so, you shouldn't. This might have been prevented otherwise.

I'm talking about multiple apps disappearing at the same time (and you can't select multiple apps unless they are adjacent to each other).

I assume you are thinking that since the applications weren't next to each other alphabetically it can't be explained. But the window might have been sorted by date or size, for example. And actually you can select noncontiguous files by command clicking items. And, unfortunately, the mass deletion of files is something I've seen more than one user accidentally perform.

In the end, this may wind up being one of those things you never satisfactorily resolve (unless you have a cat - cats are involved in many unexplained disappearances). As Kappy noted, there is value to using a standard account rather than an admin account.

Well if what you are saying is true then that only leaves your disk drive is on its last legs if it is capable of losing that many files without your help. I suggest you using Disk Utility to Verify your disk drive.



___________________

Allan

Hi roweki;

I only skim read the thread prior to answering so I failed to notice that fact. Still it has been my experience after supporting servers since 1981 that when disks start losing data for no apparent reason they are usually on the way out. If nothing else make sure everything is backed at least twice until the reason is found.

It isn't a UFO, I have seen disk do this if that makes you feel any better. The downside is they always had to be replaced shortly afterwards.


___________________

Allan