Lost Folder on External Hard Drive

Hi all,

Today I tried to delete my time machine back up to free some space on my external hard drive. Unfortunately my mac would not delete the back up via Trash, so as a last resort I ran a terminal command to locate the folder within my external hard drive and force delete it. I couldn't just delete the partition because i had lots of other stuff on the external hard drive.

After the terminal command was successful ,deleting only what was in the trash folder within my external hard drive, the back up was deleted. However at the same time three folders have disappeared from within my external hard drive all containing films i was storing. Strangely all three of the folders that appear to have been deleted had an asterisk infront of the folder name.

I can't figure out what has happened to them and how they were seemingly deleted. If anyone could shed any light on this issue i would be very grateful.

We advise folks that Time Machine backups can only successfully be removed by using the Time Machine removal process. In other words, you must enter Time Machine, highlight the backup you wish removed on the right side (in pink), select remove, enter your admin password, and then the backup is removed. You very likely have accidentally removed the three folders containing your films at the same time.

Ah that's a low ebb. Well i'm currently running Boomerang Data Recovery to see if it picks up anything. Looks like I won't be getting my film collection back anytime soon then!

Thanks for your reply, greatly appreciated.

If it's important, you might be able to rescue the deleted files with something like DataRescue. You can search for it. It's about $100US, but if the film collection is important, it might be worth the investment to try.