MacOS – Disappearing folder on Macbook Air

data-recoverymacos

I have a few folders for uni projects in the documents section on my Mac.
One of the folder containing most of my work, powerpoints, word documents and JPEG's has disappeared randomly. The other folders are there it is just this one.

I have tried Spotlight search and everything but it doesn't show up. However if I go to open most recent files in PowerPoint they appear and when I go to save them it claims that the files still exist. I have recovered all the PowerPoint and Word documents and now backed my files to an external hard drive but I was wondering if there were any suggestions to recover the file or at least the JPEG items that I can't seem to find. They were originally Photoshop files but I didn't save them as a PSD only because they take up so much space and it was unnecessary for what I required.

Any help I can get would be amazing! Thank you!

Best Answer

To recover your lost files, you could try TestDisk, or PhotoRec, the dedicated picture recovery version.
There's also Disk Drill, which offers a freemium product (that seems fairly easy to use). I haven't tried it.

Keep in mind that to recover files the recommended procedure is to stop using the affected disk immediately, and ideally mounting it as an external drive on another system to do the recovery from there, as space marked as free on your hard drive gets overwritten randomly.

About files appearing on "Recent" menus: it is not an indicator that the file is still on your hard drive. It is usually a link to where the file was when you opened it.