I plugged my MyBook into my MacBook this afternoon to backup some photos. I do this every 6 months or so; sometimes more frequently. Today, when I opened the drive, my entire “pictures” folder is missing. This is all of my photos from the past 7 years, and so I’ve spent the past few hours searching through the hard drive, hoping I’d somehow dragged the folder into some place it doesn’t belong. Through that searching, I’ve also discovered that there are a few other folders missing, or with contents that don’t fit the labels (an entire “old computer” folder is nearly completely empty).
I’ve seen some threads about how a folder might be there, but the contents aren’t accessible - this isn’t the case. The entire folder is flat out gone. There are some folders that remain untouched - those files seem to be just fine, but now I’m definitely nervous about continuing to use this hard drive.
Is there a way for me to recover these files (preferably without paying a bunch of money)? What happened? How do I prevent it?
I did a scan on Disk Utility and it came up clean - nothing was corrupt.
Any and all advice would be great!