Macbook Air erased saved files

[Abesmac]

My son has a macbook air purchased last September. Never had a problem. It has not been shut down in a while - just closed. Last night it when he opened it it would not turn on (he claims that after I installed parental control software about 2 months ago that he has never been able to shut it down, though he never told me this). I was not home to help him but 3 hours later he went back to open it again and it turned on and it seems to have lost all his files (Open Office, videos, etc) back to a certain point in time. It seems as though files that were open at the time of the crash were lost, even though they had been saved. Is this possible? - that if the file was open that they would be erased?

Thanks,
Ben

 

[Stingray454]

I've never heard of open files being deleted on a restart, it sounds strange. Could he have changed the default user perhaps? Ie, that all his videos and documents was on his personal user, but for some reason he created a new user or set the Guest user as the default one - that way, when you restart you would be logged in as a different user, and have separate home directories (which would account for the missing files). If you do a Spotlight search for any of the missing files, does it turn up there?

Try going to System Preferences -> Users & Groups and see what user is the default one, and if there is others. If so, you can switch to the correct user by clicking the apple on the top left and select "Log Out <name>" and then log in with the other user.

The only other explanation I could think of is that he maybe had a Time Machine backup made a few weeks ago and chose to restore that - that would restore all files on the system to the state they were in at the point of the backup.

Hope you sort this out, let us know what the problem was if you solve it.