Disappearing files on external hard drive?

A very weird thing just happened, I googled this problem, and was following all of the suggestions and nothing was working.

Then I tried something new I opened the Seagate drive and clicked on the gear (the settings icon that lets you create new folder, eject, get info etc) went down to “arrange by” -and selected name and all of a sudden all of my files appeared! Before this was selected nothing was selected and nothing was showing.

Hope this helps others. Feeling very relieved!

The case of the disappearing files occurs with all kinds of external hard drives, regardless of format.

I'm running a hard drive recovery on my FW800 G-Drive 2TB, and so far, after a day of scanning, it's discovered 5.8GB of missing data.

I've lost several files. This seems to be an issue with OS X and needs to be addressed immediately. I've already submitted a Feedback on Apple's website.

*edit*

After doing a web search, a LOT of people are having these problems.

I've been looking through a lot of this same issue here and elsewhere, and I'm appalled at the misdirection and finger-pointing that some people are throwing out. It is useful to run a Disk Repair, but when a file is missing, it's missing and you can't bring it back with a Disk Repair. Doing a Disk Repair might tell you that something was wrong with the directory structure that could have been involved in causing the files to disappear - but it doesn't help explain why files disappear when Disk Repair doesn't find anything wrong with the directory structure. And I've gone the extra step and used DiskWarrior to further test the drive.

I'm running Lion on my iMac. Everything is always kept up to date. I recently discovered many missing files in my external drive. Here's the scenario: Folder A contains folders B, C, and D. There are files in all of A, B, C, and D. Suddenly, all files in B, C, and D disappeared. A Disk Repair found nothing wrong with the drive.

I have been involved with some of my clients who were running Snow Leopard. One of them lost dozens of photos from iPhoto, the other lost several different kinds of files from different places. I carefully examined their systems and could find nothing wrong, and my job is to know how to find a problem with a Mac and fix it. I have also ruled out anything that might have been user error.

So, as far as I'm concerned, this condition of disappearing files has been around for a while. If Apple doesn't want to acknowledge it, it's only because they haven't experienced it themselves - and nothing that happens in the field can ever be verified or reproduced on command.

The one and only way I know of that would help track this down is a full Time Machine backup of the drives involved. In my case, I would need a 5TB drive. And since files disappear from external drives as well as internal drives, it would also be necessary to have multiple Time Machine drives to swap in and out periodically in case the OS decides to wipe out files in Time Machine. Then, rather than wait to discover that a file is missing, the content (structure) of the latest Time Machine backup would have to be compared to previous backups and a report provided showing the differences. This can be done fairly easily using a shell script - something I am quite experienced doing - and it might even be turned into a utility app. Something for me to work on. But even with this, it might take months before the user notices that the report is showing missing files that should not be missing. Human interaction is required for such a report. And on a daily basis, the user will delete files, so taking notice of which ones that are really missing will require some intense scrutiny and awareness by the user.

That said, Apple needs to step up its own analysis of disappearing files - and quickly. And this means acknowledging that such a thing actually happens.

Thank you very much @badboytherock for the solution you suggested.. This really helped with this common problem (about dissapearing files) from hard disk drives. Until now, i thought that the problem was caused by the macos (because i always use hdd with ntfs format in order to access my files from both windows and macos. Finally i realised that the problem with the directories and lost files that can't even been deleted is caused by the mounting programm you installed in order to write on your ntfs drive in macos. The bad news is that this bug cannot be prevented, but can be resolved in windows os. You simply plug the drive with the missing files and press the scan and repair (on the pop up window that appears when you connect your hdd drive). On a drive with 380gb of files it took over 3,5 hours to finish the process but in the end the files were back into place ! So follow this method and the solution is almost sure. Keep in mind also that files may be dissapear after unexpected disconection of your drive. So always eject the drive before disconect it and change the cable if it's faulty and causes disconnection. Thanks again for the help.

I had the very same issue with Seagate plus 2TB which was formatted in NTFS.

All of a sudden around 800GB of data disappeared. The folder shows 0 bytes on disk.

Disk utility on Mac didn't report any errors.

This is what worked for me to completely recover the entire data.

Plug the hard drive into windows PC.

Windows popped up a message saying that there are problems with the disk and should be fixed.

Go ahead and allow windows to scan and fix the errors(looks like file indexes are messed up but Not bad sectors though).

Poof. All my data can be accessed post fix.

Hi Cory,

Run Repair Disk: open Disk Utility > select your HD in the panel on the left side (the name of the external HD’s manufacturer and the model number) > click Repair Disk at bottom of main window. Run this at least twice, and keep running it until it says “appears ok” twice in a row. If that doesn’t happen, you may need a stronger utility (such as DriveGenius, TechToolPro, DiskWarrior) or if the directory is damaged beyond repair, you may have a damaged HD which will need to be replaced (repair utilities can only repair the directory structure, not the HD itself). When this is finished, quit Disk Utility and see if your files are visible.

Note: if you are lucky enough to make it through this with your files intact, and if your files are of value to you (it sounds like they are), you need to back them up on a second external HD; all HDs kept in use will fail, and no one can accurately predict when.

corymoore wrote:

NTFS from my windows computer i got rid of for the Macbook Pro. But i mean, it worked perfectly for the past 3 months without this issue.

It worked on what machine? Mac does not write natively to NTFS; it needs to be modified. Are you running third party software to write to NTFS? If so, have you checked for updates?

corymoore wrote:

It worked perfectly on the same Macbook Pro i'm using now I mean.

Yes, I am using NTFSmounter. I was using a different one before but the trial ran out, totally forget the name of it now though.

Might this issue happen to correspond to using the new NTFS app?

jrc39 wrote:

I've been looking through a lot of this same issue here and elsewhere, and I'm appalled at the misdirection and finger-pointing that some people are throwing out. It is useful to run a Disk Repair, but when a file is missing, it's missing and you can't bring it back with a Disk Repair. Doing a Disk Repair might tell you that something was wrong with the directory structure that could have been involved in causing the files to disappear - but it doesn't help explain why files disappear when Disk Repair doesn't find anything wrong with the directory structure. And I've gone the extra step and used DiskWarrior to further test the drive.

Hi j,

Regarding Repair Disk and your first paragraph, I don't know what you know and don't know, so please don't be offended it you already know this, but maybe it would help if you understood that the file's name, stored in the directory, is not the file itself, it's just a "tag" (or think of it like a map giving directions where to find the data itself) to locate the actual data file. When the directory gets corrupted, it can lose the "link" between the file name and the actual data file. Rebuilding/restoring the directory can put the two back together again, therebye allowing you to see the data file that you could not before. Does it always work that way? Certainly not, but sometimes it does.

You are right about the link. I'm not offended. I've repaired broken links and recovered deleted files before. And I did mention that when Repair Disk and DiskWarrior can't find anything wrong, why is it that the missing file can't be explained why it's missing? It's all too easy to shrug our shoulders over things like this and say, "S... happens!" I've worked in the industry all my working life and ran into that shrugging every time the developer has more on his mind than fixing something that he/she doesn't have a clear way to reproduce the problem. And I can't fault them for that. I have given a suggestion for how to troubleshoot that problem, and it's something I'll work on for myself. Until then, I'm just one more person who has experienced, "those files were there yesterday, and today they're gone! What happened to them?" We may never know the answer to that question, but at least I may have some satisfaction in knowing when it happens - down to the most recent backup. But even with that proof, it's not likely to move development into finding such a ghost.

Thanks for getting involved.

It has happened to me in the past too, but not more than once or twice. I'm one of those shoulder-shruggers, mostly because I don't have the expertise to do anything about it. So I make multiple and redundant backups, and since making that investment in time and hardware, I've never lost a file to my knowledge. Good luck to you in your endeavor, I hope it leads somewhere and can help others. 😉

Hi All

I had the same problem on Mac with NTFS drive, I had about 12 folders with video footage and suddenly 2 of them got emptied. I looked for hours how to solve this issue. What worked for me was that I attached drive to windows machine and the first thing that appeared on screen was system question if I want to scan drive for problems or run without scan, when I clicked to make the scan, after few minutes I got message that my problems were fixed and I can find my missing files in folder called "found", certainly there was no such a folder but my files were back in the original locations and I was able to transfer them to exFat drive and use them on MAC without any problems

Hope this will help some of You.

Same problem here. Strangely that's the third time this happened to one of my NTFS HDs, and it's always a folder containing images that suddenly gets empty. Wonder if it's something related to Preview in finder, but there's definitely something wrong with the Mac OS...

Windows is usually the solution to fix this.

Hi, ramarg,

I have pretty much the same problem: NTFS Samsung 2TB external drive, writable in Mac OS Sierra only after some command lines (http://macdrug.com/write-ntfs-drive-macos-sierra/).

After dragging an empty Google Drive folder from desktop to one of the external drive's folders, ALL of its content (1TB of all my life's pictures, etc.) IMMEDIATELY vanished. When I click on the "Get Info" tab after right-clicking on the folder where the missing files were, it says there is no space being used!

I am using Wondersahre Data Recovery all day long, it has been detecting a huge ammount of files, but all of them are being renamed and apparently out of their original directories.

I will only have access to a Windows PC tomorrow.

My question is: can I try to recover them with Wondershare Data Recovery?

Will this affect the "scan and reapir" utility in Windows, once I plug the external drive on it tomorrow?

Thanks a lot for the attention, I'm quite desperate.