Q: files AWOL in finder
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May 2, 2012 6:00 PMby Linc Davis,I've never heard of this before, but almost certainly, you're triggering a bug in the Finder by putting too many files in one folder. In one way or another, that's been a weakness of the Finder for many years. Try distributing the files into subfolders, so that you have no more than a few hundred items in any single view.
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May 3, 2012 7:54 AMby mike whybark,Apple publishes support for up to 2.1 billion files in a folder under HFS, so I am skeptical of this explanation.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2422
The process I am directing toward the file collection may make it impractical to chunk the fileset, unfortunately.
Further observation of duplicate instances of the 14k file count folder commonly display a long delay to render the files in a finder window. Presumably whatever process is ongoing when one of these folders is opened for the first time failed somehow in the problem instance I describe.
What is exceedingly fishy and kind of dangerous seeming is the apparent simultaneous disappearance of two identical filesets. I had a batch process running in another logged-in user ID when the files appeared to disappear, and the batch process was apparently reliant on the Finder directory info rather than the info accessible via terminal, as the process halted in an error state reporting no files.
TO DO:
verify that the outboard drive is HFS
examine to possiblity of programatically chunking the fileset
examine the possibility of enabling directory traversal for batch process
even if the fileset can be chunked and then processed that may not be acceptable for the output, as the files need to reside in a single output directory.
Anyway, thanks for your input. Backups seem to be working OK, so things are moving forward even with the apparent file system volatility.
