Hello all,
My brother just called me, his wife in tears... they bought a 1TB Western Digital External HDD, and configured it to be used with Time Machine... everything appeared to be backing up as normal so he let it run. After approximately two hours he returned to his computer (MacBook Pro) the backup was complete, BUT the music and more importantly more than 4 thousand photos were gone. Completely gone without a trace. Nothing on the mac, nothing on the External HDD... nothing. Two hours at the Genius Bar was fruitless. They have no clue what happened. The only glimmer of hope seems to be that 30GB (which is less than the total backup) appears to be unaccounted for on the External HDD. They couldn't find the 30GB's on the drive but it's being used somehow.
Have any of you seen this before? I have never experienced such a massive backup disaster. I can't determine if this was caused by Time Machine or the External Hard Drive. PLEASE HELP! I will try to provide further details if needed.
Michael Bingham on behalf of his brother and sister-in-law.
..and I'm not sure it's the same thing. But I once had a friend mess up their user and get the same problem.
Go to the bottom most directory you can (usually titled "(Your Name)'s MacBook Pro", or whatever your computer is). Go to the "Users" folder and see if there are more users there than you actually have on the computer. If there are, look inside of the other users and see if the pictures are in there.
Another way to search is to use a program called Disk Inventory X (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22694), it will show you everything that is on your disk visually. If you can find it in the visual part, you can click on it and it will show you exactly where it is...