"Zero bytes" files

[prog4ever]

Hi, group!

When I post a new thread on a forum, I'm always afraid the question has been answered many times before.
I used the "search" function and didn't find a thread where this subject has been discussed.

The question (for the "pros" in here) is:

- I've had lots of m4a audio files, which I had put in order inside some folders.
Some of this m4a were converted to mp3 and transferred to a pen, to listen to in my car.

A couple of days ago, I noticed ALL of the m4a files (backed up on an external disk) have now "zero bytes" and it's impossible to listen to them, convert them, etc.
I tried to open them on the several portable Macs I have, with different OS's and processors, and the problem continues.

Of course I tried to see what the trouble was, searching for answers on the Net, with no success.

Does any of you know what might be happening here?
Any support would be very, very, appreciated.

Thanks in advance
All the best

Art

 

[zarmanto]

... A couple of days ago, I noticed ALL of the m4a files (backed up on an external disk) have now "zero bytes" and it's impossible to listen to them, convert them, etc. ...

On the surface, that sounds like it could be a hard drive failure. Sometimes when a drive fails, subsequent attempts by the operating system to repair the drive can cause files to reflect a zero byte status, to indicate that they were unrecoverable. (This can happen on both macOS and Windows machines.)

By chance, were the files stored on an old hard disk, the noisy kind with spinning platters? And you note that they're backed up to an external disk; have you attempted to access the backup copies lately? (And I'm hoping the answer to this is no... but is the backup also on a spinning platter disk?)

 

[prog4ever]

First things first: THANK YOU, for your kind reply.

All I have to say is: I really don't know what happened! The disks are all fine, no "clicks", indicating they're near their "end of life"... nothing.
No other files were affected, only the ones I mentioned.

I had to "collect" the original files, decode them and put them all in order, again. Several hours later, all went fine. A real pain on the butt, really.

These things happen for a reason, no doubt. But, what pi##es me off is not knowing what that reason is...
Perhaps one of the silly things Macs do?

Thanks again for your help. Really appreciated.

All the best.

Art

 

[Analog Kid]

It sounds like file system corruption. It might be worth opening DiskUtility and running a First Aid pass.

Someone here certainly knows more of the file system workings than me, but typically a "file" in Finder is a representation of a directory table entry in the file system which points to storage on disk. If it falls out of sync with the actual disk storage you can get weird behaviors.

As a coarse analogy (which is all I'm probably capable of here): imagine wanting to know how many pages are in War and Peace. You go to the card catalog and find where the book is located. Then go to the shelf it's supposed to be on and that shelf isn't there anymore. Unless the page count is on the card in the catalog (and I suspect it's not in that record in the file system), all you can do at that point is say that it has zero pages.