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Two K

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 14, 2016
4
0
Milwaukee, WI
Mid 2011 iMac, 2.7ghz i5, 12GB Ram, 2TB internal, 240GB External Thunderbolt

To start, I use an external thunderbolt drive as my boot drive.

I did the update to 10.12.2 today and a few things went weird. After the update did it's mandatory reboot, computer booted to internal drive (I never fully cleared the OS from the internal because it took up more room then the external drive has space), so almost everything on my computer had a ? instead of the correct icon.

This took me a few minutes to figure out, and then I rebooted and forced it to the external (holding option on boot up).

Everything recovered (on the desktop) but my pictures, documents, movies, music folders where all empty. Like, nothing at all in them.

I backup with time machine so restoring them wasn't an issue (outside of taking almost 2 hours), but I'm wondering if I did something wrong when setting those folders up that caused the OS to clear them. My internal is 2TB so I store all 4 of those folders on the internal. My main OS and most commonly used applications are on the MONSTER, and everything seems fine with all that.

Just curious if anyone has had an issue with the "personal" folders clearing like this.

Thanks!
[doublepost=1481745501][/doublepost]OH, and one more thing. My Messages history is gone as well. Opened up with zero conversations. I can't figure out how to recover this. It's not a big deal, but would be nice to get those back.
 

PieTunes

Contributor
May 6, 2016
1,012
1,873
San Diego, CA
I can't say I ever seen or heard of something like that happening. Good thing you were able to recover most of your data. As for your Messages, you said that you use Time Machine? Open your ~/Library/Messages folder in Finder, enter Time Machine, pick the backup date and restore its contents to the same place on your Mac. You may have to log out and back in or reboot the system afterwards if nothing shows up immediately after the restore.
 

Two K

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 14, 2016
4
0
Milwaukee, WI
I can't say I ever seen or heard of something like that happening. Good thing you were able to recover most of your data. As for your Messages, you said that you use Time Machine? Open your ~/Library/Messages folder in Finder, enter Time Machine, pick the backup date and restore its contents to the same place on your Mac. You may have to log out and back in or reboot the system afterwards if nothing shows up immediately after the restore.

What's strange, is that the only thing in that folder is /Plugins.

I don't see any file (in the backup either) that is the messages archive.

I actually had my computer shutdown for the weekend, and when I booted up this morning, the computer defaulted to the internal HD. I fixed that in settings, but when I logged into Messages after reboot to the external-SSD all my messages are gone again. No history at all, even the last few days since upgrade. EDIT - Messages was signed out of my AppleID and I was able to get all the messages back since upgrade by logging back in. Still nothing before that though.
 
Last edited:

sibcc

macrumors member
Oct 5, 2015
66
35
La Jolla CA
Bumping this up again. Seems like I'm the only person this happened too.. strange.

No you're not! I've now seen this from two of my own machines and have had 5 calls from clients with the same problem. It's happening across different machines and with different devices connected to icloud. It's another Apple problem and appears to be related to the storage and optimization that came with the Sierra 10.12.2 update. Everything seems fine then documents is cleared of all your files.
 

navaira

macrumors 68040
May 28, 2015
3,914
5,138
Amsterdam, Netherlands
optimization
After I installed Sierra my Macbook definitely felt optimised. So optimised in fact I am back on El Capitan and intending to keep it until optimisation is removed, which I assume will be never.

I hear good things about this Widows operating system. Is it true that by now it's easy to resolve errors in it if you've got two weeks off and a PhD? I could live with that.
 
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saudor

macrumors 68000
Jul 18, 2011
1,506
2,079
After I installed Sierra my Macbook definitely felt optimised. So optimised in fact I am back on El Capitan and intending to keep it until optimisation is removed, which I assume will be never.

I hear good things about this Widows operating system. Is it true that by now it's easy to resolve errors in it if you've got two weeks off and a PhD? I could live with that.

naw. you just need a masters now. Windows 10 has gotten quite a bit better and mirrors somewhat the experience on macOS. It's also faster then macOS. That being said, i prefer macOS due to its tight integration with iOS (SMS forwarding, etc) and mission control
 
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