Upgraded to Lion, lost all my files!!!!

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Help please. Maybe because I am not familiar with Mac, I don't know how to search and find.

I upgraded to Lion and it seems that all, yes all, my files have disappeared. I mean like everything, all my thousands of photos, music, word files etc. Heck I don't even see the hard drive listed in finder anymore!!!!!!

Can someone help me, please?
 

dtravis7


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Tell us a bit more please. Did you upgrade as in run the installer after it downloaded from the App Store? I hope you did not open Disk Utility and erase the drive! So far this is the first post with your question I have seen regarding Lion.

Give us a bit more info if you would.
 
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A bit of a panic on my part. For some reason the "finder" wasn't showing the Mac HD. Through Finder I looked and looked. So after I posted this, I calmed down a bit, opened Finder, looked at preferences, and for some reason the "display Mac Hd" was not checked. I checked it and voila' everything appeared like magic!!!!!!

Thank you for the reply and I apologize for my panic. Next time I'll take a breath or two and do some looking.
 
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Thanks for posting back with problem solved

Yes, Lion does opt to hide the hard disks as well as shared server points and external disks unless you turn this on in the Finder preferences
 
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I had that problem originally. For some reason the default is not to show the main drive in one particular view of Finder. Using Preferences in Finder does allow this to be shown.

I suppose the theory is that all the files it is 'safe' for the user to see are in Favourites, so you don't need to see the volume in Devices as well, because Devices shows folders which are best left alone.

I suspect most of us prefer to be able to see these folders - and leave them alone :)
 
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Lion does have All My Files checked as a default in Finder so I am surprised that the OP did not see their files listed there.

Mark
 
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Believe it or not the preferences had the show all files checked. Problem here is that it wasn't showing the Mac HD, where all my files are stored!!!!!

Just a bit of panic. Being new to Mac, I haven't mastered the art of finding stuff. Heck I cannot even find my time machine backups! I know it's backing up and I have a portable HD hooked up for that purpose. Guess I'll find these on the portable drive!!!
 
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Missing files

Thank you SO much for this helpful post. I had the same experience after the upgrade to Lion and thanks to your generosity - panic over and problem solved! Hugely appreciated by non-tekkie person.
 

RavingMac

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Thank you SO much for this helpful post. I had the same experience after the upgrade to Lion and thanks to your generosity - panic over and problem solved! Hugely appreciated by non-tekkie person.

This is the main reason we don't usually honor requests to delete 'mistaken' posts.
often our mistakes end up helping a lot of other people.
 

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