lost all documents after force quitting Finder

I'm using a Macbook Pro Retina, 13inch, 128GB

I was trying to restart my laptop because Skype wasn't working

It didn't allow me to restart because it said that Finder was still open

So I tried quitting Finder, but the same message came up. Instead, I force quit Finder and was finally able to restart

When my laptop came back on, I realised my Desktop picture has been changed to the default one

I didn't think this was a big deal, but when I opened my documents, I found that all the subfolders have gone

I did backed up my files onto an external hard drive but I reformatted it to exFAT to get it to work with Mac and Windows so now the backups are gone

I didn't turn on my iCloud for any of my documents

I've noticed that my remaining storage is the same as it was before, so I'm quite confident all my lost files are just playing hide and seek

Yes, I am a dimwit. But please, is there any possible workaround for this?

Try re-launching Finder.

Hold down the option key, right click on the Finder icon in the dock and then click on Relaunch.

I've done that at least 50 times

Hello and welcome to the forum! Not sure that I can help, but when your computer rebooted, were you logged into the 'user' that 'owns' the documents or possibly as another user account on your computer w/o privileges to see those docs? - just a thought since I do not know how you have user accounts set up nor whether your login(s) require a password.

As to your backups on an external drive - not sure that I understand how booting your computer would affect the external drive, so might want to explain? Dave

Thank you! So there are technically 2 users, mine and the guest, but the latter is rarely used. When I rebooted it, I was logged in as the user that owns the documents. And my login does require a password.

I already went to icloud.com and was able to restore a small percentage of my documents.

As for the backup on an external drive, I did initially have my data backed up but then I reformatted it to exFAT and I didn't realise exFAT was incompatible with Time Machine. I was reformatting it again so that it would work with Time Machine (which meant having to copy everything onto the hard drive first), but I was a little impatient in getting Skype to work, so I stopped that whole thing, relaunched Finder etc.

murakami said:

Thank you! So there are technically 2 users, mine and the guest, but the latter is rarely used. When I rebooted it, I was logged in as the user that owns the documents. And my login does require a password.

Click to expand...

Well, sorry - I was hoping that when you stated a different 'desktop image' appeared that you might have been rebooted into a different user - would have been a simple solution -

murakami said:

As for the backup on an external drive, I did initially have my data backed up but then I reformatted it to exFAT and I didn't realise exFAT was incompatible with Time Machine. I was reformatting it again so that it would work with Time Machine (which meant having to copy everything onto the hard drive first), but I was a little impatient in getting Skype to work, so I stopped that whole thing, relaunched Finder etc.

Click to expand...

OK, so you've lost your backup files on the external drive - correct? If so, then you could google 'data recovery software' but the apps are usually expensive and may not help - if trial versions are available, then you can test a program or so; data recovery services can be extremely expensive, thus 'how important' are these files to you?


As to your statement "I've noticed that my remaining storage is the same as it was before, so I'm quite confident all my lost files are just playing hide and seek" in your OP, I have three apps on my MBPro, which are DaisyDisk, WhatSize, and DiskInspector - take a look @ the links - each can give you a lot of information of what is using space on your drive. Dave