Entire folder disappeared by itself from the WD ext drive (Mac)

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

As you can imagine that this week is a terrible start - came back to office as usual, and found that for whatever reason the ‘Backup’ folder that was on the My Book had just simply vanished! It was there when I logged off work on Friday. Anyone have had similar ‘disappearance’?

I am now using a Mac recovery app to call back those files. Messy. I hope this is not something My Book is doing all the time since most people buy it to ‘backup’ stuff. :frowning:

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Is your My Book a Time Machine enabled external drive? When you logged off from Mac was the MyBook still connected? Did your recovery app located the folder?

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Hi Donald,
My Book - what do you mean by Time Machine ? It is the usual squarish box like external plugin drive that adds to the memory since my Mac is maxed out. Yes, when I login / logoff and the My Book has been there with 1000s of my files :frowning: was still shown on the Finder window, and this has been in use since 2016. Occasionally, it loses ‘contact’ like reboot and now showing up on Finder and you have to unplug/replug a few times and you can see it. But I don’t think this is an issue - I am not saying the My Book can’t be located on the Mac Finder window: it is there and all my other folders are there(the folders auto created when adding the plugin) but my main Working Folder I created called ‘Backup’ that has all my videos, images, documents, all suddenly disappeared from view two days ago! It’s like having your entire workspace deleted!

So, :frowning: what I am trying to salvage now is use a recovery app to retrieve / undelete and try and find back the stuff from the My Book (note: requires 62 hours to complete… and still at it as I write this reply!!) Therefore, IF there was some accidental hit ‘delete backup folder’ button, I would have notice ! It could never have deleted in a second! It wd be a big popup window showing two days of ongoing deletion in process and this never happened.

My Book has deep technical faults and users have to know the risk. Now instead of a ‘backup’ , I have lost all my working files! :frowning:

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sorry u mean the Mac OS time machine? yes it is there and there are some popups saying it hasn’t back up for blah blah days. However, the files were always in there, accessible and I have been saving into it as well as recalling them for work - till it all disappeared this Monday.

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What about recovery software? Did it find your deleted files?