Disconcerting loss of files

Fortunately this isn’t affecting anything I’m working on right now, but I just noticed that a number of my files are missing in my main library. They appear in the Eaglefiler view, but when I click on them I get the error message that the file doesn’t exist. And, indeed, the file is gone from the finder.

Whole folders are missing. I can’t figure out what common thread ties the missing folders together.

Also, weirdly, the “date modified” on the missing files, in Eaglefiler, has changed across the board to “December 31, 2000, 7 p.m.”

I’m sure I can go back in Time Machine and retrieve these, but this is odd and unnerving. I can’t think of anything I’ve done differently lately in Eaglefiler, except to print more pdf’s into my dropbox–where I keep my libraries–from my Windows laptop. (But not all the missing files originated that way.)

That’s normal in that if EagleFiler can’t find the file there’s no way for it to read the date, so it shows the Mac OS X “reference date.”

A missing file or folder means that something was renamed or deleted from outside of EagleFiler, so that its database is no longer in sync with the filesystem. If your library is stored in Dropbox, perhaps you can look in its event history to see when (and possibly where) the change happened. I’d also run all the disks through a repair program.

Yes, as I notice that more and more files are missing, I concluded that this has to be some kind of dropbox or computer crisis. There are really a lot of files missing.