Folder path switching to backup drive in Finder sidebar without warning

Just to give a little background on my setup, I have an external work drive that backs up nightly to an internal drive in my 2010 Mac Pro running OS X Mavericks. The master drive and the backup drive are straight clones of each other, so all the paths are the same.

So this is a bit of a bizarre and paranoia-inducing problem I encountered recently:

I was working on a project that I wanted easy access to, so I dragged the folder over to the sidebar as I usually do. I do my work. I shut down my computer at night. The next day I turn it on and continue working. No problem. One day I turn on my computer, click on the folder in the sidebar, and all my work from the previous day was gone. All of it. How could this be? I check the file path. It should say it's on my master drive, "Leonardo," but instead it says "Leonardo BACKUP." Turns out I had been working off the backup drive the previous day without my knowledge, so when the main drive went to clone itself that night, it just wiped out everything I'd done the previous day.

I've set up precautions now so that if this sort of thing happens again, there's an archive that exists on the backup drive so things aren't just deleted forever if they don't match the main drive. BUT I shouldn't have to worry about checking the drive path of my sidebar folders every time I go to work on a project. I can absolutely guarantee that I dragged the correct folder to the sidebar initially. It just decided on its own to switch over to the backup drive, possibly because the main drive got randomly ejected and the cloned backup drive was just sitting there in my Mac. But that's just a theory.

So my question is: has anyone ever heard of this sort of thing happening or know any way to prevent it?

Also, this wasn't just a one time thing. Since the initial incident, I've been checking the folder path religiously every time I open a sidebar folder. Most of the time it's been fine, but there was one other occasion where the file path had switched over to the backup drive without warning.

Help!

I could understand if a connection was lost or if there were a bug, corrupt. But changed? Never heard of that. That would be extremely unlikely. Path routing of files is so fundamental to an OS working I can't imagime a bug of such significance at this point in the OSs lifecycle. Not impossible of course just so very very unlikely.

I know you're sure in your mind that you created the link correctly, but from what you describe this is almost certainly the point things went astray.

mrplow said:

I could understand if a connection was lost or if there were a bug, corrupt. But changed? Never heard of that. That would be extremely unlikely. Path routing of files is so fundamental to an OS working I can't imagine a bug of such significance at this point in the OSs lifecycle. Not impossible of course just so very very unlikely.

I know you're sure in your mind that you created the link correctly, but from what you describe this is almost certainly the point things went astray.

Click to expand...

I know it's bizarre, and I would postulate user error as well if it happened to someone else, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that I created the link correctly.

Also, had I created the link from the backup drive initially and been working off of that the entire time, there would be no data on the main drive from previous days, but there was. There's a lot of evidence on my side pointing to this being some weird bug...

Thanks for the response though, mrplow. It's helpful to know that this isn't a common thing.

OK, accepting it's created correctly.

Do you have any Finder modifications running, replacement apps, add ins etc?

If you create an alias to you working folder and you that do you experience similar behaviour?

The only thing I can think of is Carbon Copy Cloner, which I use to back up the drive nightly.

I haven't tried creating an alias to the folder by any other means than dragging it to the finder sidebar.

Like MrPlow, I cannot imagine how any OS can switch paths like you describe. It's too fundamental to the OS for that to be happening. Is it possible that somehow in setting up CCC it's doing the reverse of what you wanted? I.e., cloning FROM the internal TO the external? How do you do the daily clone? Is that automated, or do you trigger it manually?

The daily backup is automated and only goes one way.

Is it plausible that Mavericks reconnected to the new path based on the first word in the drive name?

The drives are called "LEONARDO" and "LEONARDO Backup."

Also, on the most recent clone, I got an error from CCC saying that there were damaged sectors on the drive. It's been a few weeks since the path-switching problem I encountered, so I don't know if they are related by more than coincidence, but maybe that's useful info to have.

Which drive has the damaged sectors? No matter which it is, it's probably failing and should be replaced. I use CCC to backup a drive with "Macintosh HD" as the source and "Macintosh HD CCC" as the backup and it works just fine. To OSX, those are two entirely separate paths. What I was really asking was if it was possible that in setting up the automated daily backup you accidentally switched source and destination yourself. Given the similarity of the names, that might be easy to do.

The main drive is the one with damaged sectors (and yes, I will be replacing it).

The automated backup was set up long before this problem arose, so no dice there. I honestly wish I could say this was user error because then I wouldn't have to worry about it happening again. But like I said in the initial post, I have safeguards set up now so that if the path does switch again (I know you all find this extremely unlikely), I won't lose work, so that's comforting.

Well, if it's not CCC and it's most likely not Finder, then the next suspect is the application that you were using to modify the project in question. If it opened the internal drive copy instead of the external, then you'd have what you saw. You may well have dragged the right folder to the sidebar, but the application itself was working on the other one. I'd suspect that more than any bug in the OS itself at that fundamental level.

That definitely sounds more plausible to me as well, BUT that the sidebar folder was still linking to the main drive one day and the backup drive the next day. Mysteries!

Proof

Alright party people, get ready to have your minds blown. The problem hadn't happened in a while, but it flared up again and I realized that I could recreate the problem super easily. So here's a screen recording showing exactly what's happening:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9AxlHAtJWolVFVvWFU4QldPdTg/edit?usp=sharing

In this video, you'll see that I create a Finder sidebar link to the "Joywave" folder on the drive "LEONARDO" before ejecting the drive. After ejecting the drive, I go back into finder and click on the sidebar link, which is not broken, but rather it has relinked to my backup drive. And because it's linked to the backup drive now, when I reconnect the main drive, the path stays linked to the backup drive.

Any new thoughts?