Folder full of media disappeared from desktop

[robinsparkles]

Hi there, I'm new here and new to Macs. I bought my iMac a year and a half ago, but I have no idea how to deal with anything when something goes wrong (because it's so rare that something goes wrong!). Here's what happened:

I woke up, went to my computer, and noticed that a folder was missing off my Desktop. It was full of movie files and it was gone. Thinking a friend had maybe accidentally deleted it, I checked the Trash, not there. I looked through Finder, nowhere to be found. I tried searching specific file names via Spotlight, no luck. I have Apple Care and I called them and the representative took me through all the steps I went through myself to no avail. She also did a disk repair and a permissions repair, no luck.

The weird thing is that if the files were really gone, I would think I would have gotten a lot of disk space back, but I didn't. I'm still where I was the last time I checked, a few days ago.

So now that I've exhausted my own (very limited) knowledge AND Apple's, I'm coming to you. Does anyone have any idea what could have happened and if I have a chance of getting my files back? The woman from Apple said sometimes things like this happen when the hard drive is old (only got the computer in April 2008) but I would think that if the files were just spontaneously deleted, I should get a few gigs back on my drive.

Any help would be very appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[Ashka]

Do you still have the recommended 15% free space on your Hard Drive?

 

[JediMeister]

If you have Time Machine set up, can't you just browse the Desktop folder of a day/week ago and restore the missing folder to the Desktop?

 

[robinsparkles]

@Ashka: Yes, I do. I have about 90 Gigs left on my 250 Gig drive.
@JediMeiser: I only installed an external drive yesterday while on the phone with my Apple person since I couldn't get my computer to recognize the drive. So it was too late.

 

[arjen92]

My guess is that the files were place some where else and named differently (so you can't search them easily), so you would have to search for the size of files (you've got 3rd party software that searches and have that ability I believe).

It could also be that you made the files invisible. I don't know the answer how to solve this. Check the internet. I found this article about it, it might help you; http://www.macworld.com/article/51830/2006/07/showallfinder.html

 

[BobZune]

Install a program like GrandPerspective and scan the hard drive. The movies files, if they are still there, will be some of the largest ones and you can see what directory they are in (assuming the directory got moves/renamed).