Everything is GONE!!!

[jonnysods]

Hi there, I have no idea how this happened, and I have no solution but I wonder if anyone else has had this experience...

I was looking around on my MBP today, just getting used to the machine and where files were stored (being careful not to tinker with anything mind you). I thought of something to search online and so I opened up Safari. All of a sudden it came up with a warning (I can't remember it now) about it not being able to open up the keychain for safari or something like that. I clicked cancel because I don't use keychain and went on doing what I do.

I opened up Mail to send an email afterwards and it asked me for my account information again. I thought it was weird and so I went to go to mac rumors - same keychain problem again!

So I restarted the machine, thinking it was weird but a restart should fix it (I used to be a PC user up until a few months back so restart was always my first idea). It took a while to shutdown, a while to start up, but then things were different. All the stuff I had on my desktop (FCP files and projects) were gone. The desktop background was gone. All my emails were gone. All the settings in safari were gone. It was like I just got the machine out of the box again!

Thankfully my boot camp partition can still be seen - although I haven't gone into it just yet! I was scared so I thought I would write you guys! I couldn't find the missing files anywhere on the machine.

Sound familiar? What happened?

 

[yippy]

The most common cause of this problem is when someone renames their home folder.

Go to the users folder in the root level of your hard drive, tell us all the folders you have there and how many accounts you have set up on the computer.

 

[mkrishnan]

Open the main Mac partition (Macintosh Hard Disk) from the desktop. Navigate to the Users folder. Look in there and see if there's a folder with your user name on it, and if your original items are in there.

Almost always, when this happens, it is because you did something to initiate the creation of a new user account (i.e. the one you're logged in with now). The most common thing people do is try to rename their home directory to something other than their short user name. When they do this, OS X gets confused and creates a new user for them, complete with a new home directory, which of course does not contain any of the files that were in the other user's home directory.

But unless the thing that was done was far worse than the above, the original home dir should still be in the /users/ folder. And you can just copy your items out of it and promise never to do it again.

 

[jonnysods]

Oh, you guys are good

One thing I forgot that I did was renamed my directory from 'thesods' to 'Jon'. Sure enough I looked on the main partition and there were my old files.

What should I do, should I delete the newly created folder by OS, then rename the 'Jon' folder to 'thesods'?

Thanks for your quick responses guys.

 

[shu82]

I am in the same situation. I renamed a tibook because I am giving it to my grandmother, but I dont have any of my photos in iphoto and no music in itunes. I can fish them out, but how do I return it to the way it was without changing the name?

 

[jonnysods]

Where have the demi gods gone?

 

[swiftaw]

If you changed the name of your home folder, see here for how to fix it.


https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/274450/

 

[stoid]

This reminds me of a time that a friend called me panicked that all his settings had disappeared. Turns out he had gotten tired of looking at 'all those silly folders' in his home folder, and had moved them all into the user Documents folder.

 

[killmoms]

This is what happens when you try to stick a UNIX-style filesystem organization scheme on people unfamiliar with the concept. They rename the home folder because they don't realize YOU DON'T FREAKING DO THAT EVER, and then go .

 

[quigleybc]

This is what happens when you try to stick a UNIX-style filesystem organization scheme on people unfamiliar with the concept. They rename the home folder because they don't realize YOU DON'T FREAKING DO THAT EVER, and then go .

LOL


this is so true