Entire drive spontaneously deleted itself...

[MerryPop-Ins]

I'm not strictly expecting anybody to devise a fix on this since there's nothing to be done about it now except hope it doesn't repeat, and I did have a backup of my lost data anyway (it's copying as I type), but I'm submitting this because I'd never heard of anything like it happening anywhere other than in terrible fiction, and wanted to see if anybody else had ever experienced or heard of anything similar.

I've got a Mac Pro 5,1 on extended life support, and I've made a number of major modifications to it recently. For the most part, it runs quite smoothly, and even though it does give me the occasional bit of weirdness, I've come to expect that from an old computer with a lot of odd parts (unapproved GPU, Thunderbolt card, etc.) and a recently-updated OS that I have yet to really get used to (Mojave, obviously).

That said, just now I had finished work for the day and decided to copy my changes to my backup drive (Seagate Enterprise HDD) from my work drive (OWC Electra 3G SSD). I command-dragged the folder from the work drive to the backup drive, Finder did its thing and told me that it could merge the folders, I approved the merge, it started copying, everything seemed perfectly normal, and I stepped away for all of two minutes. When I returned, the backup had been completed as expected, but the work drive (the SSD) was completely wiped clean. The drive's contents weren't in the trash, but files that had already been in the trash prior to the backup were still there, waiting to be emptied away.

So, basically, Finder copied all my new and modified files into their respective backup folders and then, once that process was complete (and my back was turned - seriously, who writes these terrible scripts?), spontaneously insta-deleted my work drive in its entirety, without asking for authorization of any kind. What in the...

I feel like I've missed some really obvious and important detail here... I'm not aware of any preference that might be responsible for this, and I'm pretty sure the option to scrap all my data wasn't presented to me when I approved the merge. My drives all check out fine in both Disk Utility and SoftRAID, but if this sort of nonsense is even possible now, it is more than a bit worrisome...

 

[jbarley]

You mentioned that you "command-dragged the folder" which will do a move.
After the move command completed the source would be gone.
The more often used keys would be Alt-drag which would make a copy
I always make sure the the little "+" sign is visable with the cursor when doing such commands.

 

[MerryPop-Ins]

Okay, so it really was just lame user error on my part? Thanks for the info, now I've kind of embarrassed myself online... not unexpectedly... I happily accept my own culpability if it means that I don't have to worry about repeated drive erasure.

Nevertheless, I need more info if possible. Move/merge/overwrite etc. is all a little difficult to suss out properly, in that Finder sometimes offers some of these options, or all of them, or none of them, and even holding down command/alt doesn't always seem to lead to the same choices, so I've found it all a bit confusing. I've only just migrated from El Cap, and had always done it this way without issue, making absolutely sure to select merge and no other option. If I'm understanding correctly, command-drag and merge is actually move, but alt-drag and merge is just merge? Is this explained during the operation and I'm just a bit of a numpty, or are we expected to simply be aware of this very important info ? And how is this now different from El Cap to Mojave, if it even is?

 

[BrianBaughn]

You might consider a more elegant method of doing those regular backups. I'm using Carbon Copy Cloner. I won't go into detail of my setup but I'll just say that if I use Finder to copy a lot of files to another drive and there's some sort of error the process will stop and give no indication of what happened. In the same scenario, CCC will copy/update everything it can and specific file problems are reported.

 

[MerryPop-Ins]

Thanks for the constructive suggestion, Brian. I've had CCC in my cart waiting to checkout for a while, as I needed it to clone my system disk and it seemed fully-featured for backups and so on, so I'd been considering a purchase.

I've just spent the last couple of months mired in technical details and stressful upgrades, and it seemed at the time as though CCC would be a lot to learn, so I was saving that for the very end of the process (basically now). I'll give it a shot.

I suppose this thread can be closed. Thanks for your help.

 

[carylee2002]

CCC is something you should always have in your system. I use it all the time and have my system drive backup onto 2 different HD's with different OS and with different Security update. My latest one has 2020-06 update and Safari 13...though right now Im using 2020-07 and Safari 14.0 and not 14.1 or 14.2. This way if I don't like these latest updates I can just revert back to the 2020-04 that ran stable for me.

 

[Honza1]

CCC is critical tool, but I am not sure if it is the best here. You could create clone job of specific folders and let it run on schedule or manually. I do that and it is great.
But if you just find Finder lacking in usability, there are more advanced Finder replacement tools. I use Forklift, but there are others. Routinely you can find at least one as part of "app bundles" for reasonable price. Typically offer more features and more handholding. And more safety - usually ask before destroying your data ;-)