Disappearing records in EF

Yesterday EF seems to have lost one of my records. I had opened it (a pdf) in Adobe, but couldn’t find it back in EF. I looked in Records and in the Trash – it was not in either. Back in Adobe, I tried to save the file after editing it to put it back in EF. Adobe saw the location in EF that the pdf had come from, but I got an error message – something like “the file could not be found.” (Unfortunately, I didn’t save the message…).
I think the same thing happened a few days ago with another record from the same library.
What could cause this?

I think in almost 20 years of EagleFiler I’ve never heard of a record completely disappearing. In order for that to to happen, either:

  • You would have to put it in the trash and empty the trash without realizing; or

  • There would need to be some sort of problem with your Mac’s storage that deleted both the PDF file and the information about it that’s stored in EagleFiler’s database. If only the file were deleted, EagleFiler would still see it in the database and report it as missing. If only the database entry were lost, it would detect the file and import it as a new record. Both of these checks will happen if you close and re-open the library.

I suppose it’s also possible that the record got renamed, and so it’s there but you are not seeing it. Or, if the library is in cloud storage, that somehow the cloud synced down old versions of everything, which could make a newer file and its database entry disappear.

It would be good to know exactly what error Adobe reported if you see it again. I would have assumed that Adobe loaded the whole file into memory, so you should be able to do a Save As and create a new file even if the old one no longer exists.

You could save a diagnostic report in case there’s anything relevant in EagleFiler’s error log.