All desktop files and folders have gone

[MacInWin]

Then they are gone. I suspect gone because Camtasia mucked with the directory and then overwrote the files because it thought the space was open. You can recover from the week old backup what you can, but anything since then is gone. Sorry about that.

 

[kyle1988]

Thats not good at all. I don't get how its done that and not even saved the camtasia video file.

 

[MacInWin]

not even saved the camtasia video file.

That is probably part of the cause. Video files are huge. We haven't talked about how much space is left on the drive, or how bid the drive is, but Camtasia, when interacting with Finder to find space for the video, probably mucked up the directory in Finder somehow and just overwrote everything. I know that's not solace for lost files, but it may be how it happened.

 

[kyle1988]

There was 390gb left when I exported.

Oddly I have another user on the imac. Logged into that account and I have the same excel file on there. When I try opening it I get this message....



Baffling...Worth taking it to the apple store?

 

[MacInWin]

You can take it to Apple. They might do a hardware test to see if the drive is failing. Other than that, they will very likely say, "That is a really old machine," "do you have a backup," and "We can reformat and reinstall the OS for you," and not much else. I'm not even sure if a 2012 is still being supported at all.

From the fact the other user is also losing file integrity, I suspect the drive is dying. I'd make a backup, soon. For all users. But I would not overwrite the last good backup because the entire drive could be corrupted and if you write corrupted data over the good, that's a double loss. Get a new drive for the new backup.

To be honest, things are not looking good at all.

 

[Rod]

What app did you use to record cantasia? Where would it normally save it's recordings. I'm thinking the file may not have a title that would be easily recognised. ie cant search for something if you don't know what its called. Even a prefix would help eg .doc or .img
Once something is created it does not normally just disappear without some action to erase or move it.
What worries me is you say you "shared" it to the desktop. If you are using the term correctly then a copy was sent somewhere and the original should be still there, wherever "there" is.

 

[Rod]

It might be worth plugging in Time Machine and checking that because even when the backup is not connected it still takes regular snapshots of the system which are downloaded when your backup is connected. You might just be lucky.

 

[MacInWin]

Rod, the app was, I believe, Camtasia. I found it here: Camtasia | Screen Recording & Video Editing

And from the OP, it sounded like it was used to record something, but in the save process the system was wiped out.

The suggestion about TM is good, If and only if, TM is turned on to make backups automatically. Given that the OP says backups are once a week, who knows if it's on at all? And if the drive is headed south, those snapshots, if they exist, could also be mucked up. But, it's worth a shot, just in case he gets lucky with it.

 

[MacInWin]

Hmm, did a bit of digging on Camtasia's site. According to them, it needs 10.11 or better to run. But the OP says his system is 10.10.

So for kyle1988, have you updated Camtasia recently? If so, and if you updated to the current version, it's not compatible with your older system. That might be part (or all) of the problem.

 

[gsahli]

How much free hard drive space do you have? To me this sounds like a situation where you ran out of space.

 

[usagora]

How much free hard drive space do you have? To me this sounds like a situation where you ran out of space.

In post #24, he said 390GB. More than enough.

 

[kyle1988]

Yes I had 390gb then after everything disappeared off the desktop it shot up to 450gb.

I have updated to sierra and now a bunch of extra things have appeared in my trash.



Again everything inside the recovered files just want to open in terminal? Everything is still missing from the desktop.

 

[MacInWin]

As I said, the default for unknown files to open is Terminal, but that's only happening for these recovered files because all the real information about them, called metadata, has been lost. They probably don't have the extent for any application in the filename. But you can still try to open them in other applications, including Textedit, which may be able to show you want is actually in the file. Just don't save them back from those applications, as they will then be given the metadata for Textedit.

Just about every time you reboot you can end up with "recovered" files if you have applications open at the time of the shutdown/reboot. They are generally the work files from the various applications, like, for example, a Word document that is open but hasn't been saved in a while. The scratch copy of the document will be "recovered" because the space was allocated for the scratch copy but never saved to the directory proper. 99.9% of the time recovered files can be deleted safely, which is why they typically show in the Trash in the first place.

 

[kyle1988]

I put them in textedit and get this...



In the trash however pictures and docs that I deleted a while ago have reappeared after the upgrade but not the desktop stuff (I never put it in trash).

Is just hard to accept its all just vanished.

 

[MacInWin]

You didn't put it in the trash. The OS puts it there because normally "recovered" files are petty useless, as you have discovered. But just in case, the system leaves it up to you to empty the trash of the recovered stuff.

I know the feeling of losing a drive. As I said, I lost a drive AND the backup drive a few years ago and am still trying to recover from it.

 

[gsahli]

Sorry to ask this again, but confirm you had 390 GB BEFORE you started with Camtasia, not after. And 390 GB might not have been enough space for what you were doing.
Just asking. I've read online that it is often >1 GB per minute, but I guess you'd still have to capture over 2 hours to exceed 390 GB.