Two days after upgrading to Catalina, I have noticed that some subdirectories are missing. I'm not exactly sure when these directories went missing as I was on vacation, but here is what happened.
- I upgraded to Catalina few days ago
- Decided to delete some directories, mostly
node_modulesfrom old projects, to get some free space. - After that I didn't touch anything and discovered that some directories are missing when I get back home.
Original size of www directory was somewhere around 55GB and similar size is shown in Finder. DaisyDisk also shows that there are 55GB of hidden files somewhere (it's not telling where).
sudo du -sh www/ shows directory size of 10MB.
Free space before deleting node_modules was 11GB and after deleting (now) is 20GB. If files under my www directory were really deleted, free space would be much larger.
Based on other answers found here and on the Internet, I have tried the following:
- Tried restore using DiskDrill. No success.
- Run First Aid under Disk Utility. No success.
- Relocated Items directory is empty. No success.
- Recovering using Stellar Data Recovery. No success.
- Scanned using GrandPerspective. No success.
What else can I try?
Best Answer
There is a 3rd party app called Stellar Data Recovery. There is a free trial period that can be used to recover your files. I used it about 8 months ago for some lost files and it recovered them for me. It was relatively easy to use as I did it myself and I'm not great at that type of thing. The software sells for $80 but it has a free download.