Odd home folder issue I have not ever seen in my 10+ year experience supporting mac using friends.. Just wondered if anyone had any thoughts or similar experiences!?
my friend went to log in last night under his normal user account and got a strange message cannot log in to account at this time
I had a look via another test account and could see no folders in his home folder except for a virtually empty library' folder, (it had one .plist file in tact, absolutely nothing else!) and I also checked over firewire from my macbook and confirmed the home folder was empty, I added up the data on the other folders, (apps, system, library etc) and it reported the correct amount as if the home folder had no content. (I thought it was hiding or may be in the trash somehow)
Disaster for the poor guy, hes a working DJ and has unfinished projects waiting to go.
Luckily he has a Time Capsule, one of the fancy new tall square 2tb jobbys, plugged it in and could see it has comprehensive backups going back for months. I start his mac in recovery mode and start the machine restoring from a recent ( not the most recent ) time machine back up, I leave him at this point assuming he would be back up and running in an hour or so.
Wrong.. he calls me up and the same thing has happened again, he cant log into the machine, it gives the same not available message and although it spent 45 minutes copying data his home folder is empty, Ive never seen anything like this and I am frankly stumped,
Any ideas!?
Im not sure that it has much relevance but he is running a 13 2012 Macbook Pro, 10.8.5, and he had replaced the optical drive with an SSD with his OS and user folder and has a separate drive which is a 750GB SATA with his audio projects and samples, it has all been running quite happily for months
please excuse the essay, and thanks in advance for any help getting to the bottom of this!
my friend went to log in last night under his normal user account and got a strange message cannot log in to account at this time
I had a look via another test account and could see no folders in his home folder except for a virtually empty library' folder, (it had one .plist file in tact, absolutely nothing else!) and I also checked over firewire from my macbook and confirmed the home folder was empty, I added up the data on the other folders, (apps, system, library etc) and it reported the correct amount as if the home folder had no content. (I thought it was hiding or may be in the trash somehow)
Disaster for the poor guy, hes a working DJ and has unfinished projects waiting to go.
Luckily he has a Time Capsule, one of the fancy new tall square 2tb jobbys, plugged it in and could see it has comprehensive backups going back for months. I start his mac in recovery mode and start the machine restoring from a recent ( not the most recent ) time machine back up, I leave him at this point assuming he would be back up and running in an hour or so.
Wrong.. he calls me up and the same thing has happened again, he cant log into the machine, it gives the same not available message and although it spent 45 minutes copying data his home folder is empty, Ive never seen anything like this and I am frankly stumped,
Any ideas!?
Im not sure that it has much relevance but he is running a 13 2012 Macbook Pro, 10.8.5, and he had replaced the optical drive with an SSD with his OS and user folder and has a separate drive which is a 750GB SATA with his audio projects and samples, it has all been running quite happily for months
please excuse the essay, and thanks in advance for any help getting to the bottom of this!