Accidentally hiding (making "invisible") files and folders?

[Bellboy, The]

So my brother calls me up freaking out saying that he can't find a folder in an external drive of gigs of photos that he's working on.

Full disclosure: he's on Ventura (mostly up-to-date, he hasn't installed the latest update) and is using Photoshop/Bridge 2024.

I remote into his machine and sure enough I find that the folder in his external drive is hidden (by hitting CMD-Shift-"."). He's using Carbon Copy Cloner to back up the drive to another standalone HDD in the same enclosure and that folder is there and it isn't hidden.

After many googles, I find that the only thing I can find to manually hide folders/files is the keyboard shortcut showing me system files that I mentioned above (well, duh). So I finally come across a YouTube video showing me how to use Terminal to manually hide/unhide folders/files and I was able to get his folder unhidden (phew). BTW for those that don't know, the terminal command to hide/unhide is:

[computer] chflags nohidden [filepath]

[computer] chflags hidden [filepath]

Now, the big question: how in the hell did this happen in the first place?!? Granted my bro isn't the most tech savvy guy, but it certainly doesn't seem that this was done by a fat fingered keystroke or missed mouse menu target. I did find someone with a similar issue here, but there was no resolution or cause found. Since they mention Stage Manager in that post I wonder if that could be the culprit.

Does anyone have a clue as to how this could be happening? TIA

 

[JimmyG]

Thanks for the Terminal commands, like you, I was only aware of the keyboard shortcut for hiding/showing invisibles. More methodologies here...

Search OS X Daily: show invisibles

Search OS X Daily

Visit the post for more.

osxdaily.com

Following topic to see if anyone uncovers the cause! Best of luck.

 

[ignatius345]

This is probably a paranoid line of reasoning, but is there a chance that some piece of malware would intentionally trigger hiding of files to cover its tracks from casual observers?

 

[Bellboy, The]

Thanks for the Terminal commands, like you, I was only aware of the keyboard shortcut for hiding/showing invisibles. More methodologies here...

Search OS X Daily: show invisibles

Search OS X Daily

Visit the post for more.

osxdaily.com

Following topic to see if anyone uncovers the cause! Best of luck.

Thanks for the links.

I think my suspicions have been validated. I don't trust Adobe further than I can throw them and it looks like the 2023 version of Bridge might have been the culprit in this case. My bro was using that version instead of jumping to the '24 version.

I figured that it would be software-based and not coming from macOS.

Here's a discussion on Adobe's site talking about it--although not exactly the same problem, I can add 2+2 here.
Bridge 2023 hiding files

Another discussion:
Files missing in Bridge 2023

 

[JimmyG]

Here's a discussion on Adobe's site talking about it--although not exactly the same problem, I can add 2+2 here.
Bridge 2023 hiding files

From your link...

<<
Somewhere in there I started noticing that Bridge was leaving behind invisible files in many of my folders called ".bridgesort".
>>

...was not what your brother was experiencing?

 

[Bellboy, The]

From your link...

<<
Somewhere in there I started noticing that Bridge was leaving behind invisible files in many of my folders called ".bridgesort".
>>

...was not what your brother was experiencing?

Not at all. One of his folders with a lot of image files just disappeared. After hitting CMD-Shift-"." there it was. In all of my searches, I couldn't find a way to replicate the issue.

I did see threads like the ones I posted, but none of them were exactly like this issue. I found it interesting that the Adobe apologists wanted to blame the user instead of maybe thinking it could be Adobe's software. The one common thread was that they were all using Bridge '23.