Lost Files and I don't know how

[theladyhemlock]

I have an older iMac, I purchased it in 2007 or so. Today while editing and saving photos in Photoshop, the app locked up (wheel of death) and then everything closed out. All my files and folders on my desktop vanished except the one I was working on and the background changed to a random Mac image. I lost everything except that one folder. Quite a lot of art, but mainly the images and art my late sister made. I am devastated and have spent several hours digging to see if I can find any of them.

Is there a way of recovering them? Does anyone know what happened? I was literally clicking 'Save As' and typing in the name (ie, 'moss3') then clicking 'OK'. Close that file out, start saving the next one. After about four or five images the wheel of death appeared, and that's when I lost everything. If you have any insights, I would really appreciate it!

 

[cmaier]

I have an older iMac, I purchased it in 2007 or so. Today while editing and saving photos in Photoshop, the app locked up (wheel of death) and then everything closed out. All my files and folders on my desktop vanished except the one I was working on and the background changed to a random Mac image. I lost everything except that one folder. Quite a lot of art, but mainly the images and art my late sister made. I am devastated and have spent several hours digging to see if I can find any of them.

Is there a way of recovering them? Does anyone know what happened? I was literally clicking 'Save As' and typing in the name (ie, 'moss3') then clicking 'OK'. Close that file out, start saving the next one. After about four or five images the wheel of death appeared, and that's when I lost everything. If you have any insights, I would really appreciate it!

I assume you aren’t using time machine or any other backup strategy? You may have local time machine backups even if you aren‘t backing up to an external disk.

 

[Fishrrman]

You recover from a disaster like this by going to your backup drive.

Do you have one?

 

[TwoH]

This does sound like a failure with your hard drive, as Fishrrman said - do you have a backup drive? Else you might have to go somewhere that can do data recovery for you.

 

[mavis]

I lost data once, years ago, and since then I've kept multiple backups. Weekly backups to a Synology NAS, which itself is backed up to a large external HDD connected to my Mac, which (along with my internal and external SSDs) is continuously backed up to Backblaze (off-location backups) ... that, plus periodic Time Machine backups, and selective syncing of some directories to iCloud and Dropbox. Oh, and an archive HDD of everything, updated every 3-6 months, just for good measure.

Losing important data is not something I care to go through again. For the OP, yeah - I hope you had even a minimal backup strategy in place. If not, at least now you know.

 

[theladyhemlock]

Thanks all. I don't have an actual backup for this one (I know, I know!) and the hard drive is working fine. It literally just wiped all the files from my desktop, but not in other locations. I am looking at some recovery programs to try and will likely do that tomorrow. My sister thinks she has my late sister's files on various external drives, so that alleviates my main concern.

I do have backups of previous work and even for my laptop, but since i rarely use the iMac I hadn't thought to back it up. Well, now I will be more vigilant about backing up before I start anything.

Thanks again!