Files lost? Mac Drive client

SeaDrive
#1

Morning!

Last night I invited my wife to begin using my seafile pro account to back up her photos. I installed the drive v3 application on her mac and set her up with a library and user account. She wanted to share her photos with me so dragged the folder from her icloud into ‘Shared with all’. The mac showed a popup asking her to confirm the move, she clicked move.

It moved the folder over which then immediately vanished without warning. She was not able to undo the move. I had a browse around using a terminal and could find no sign of the folder. It was all our photos from last year which included everything we took on our honeymoon. It was the only copy of the that folder. It was no longer in icloud nor was it in the ‘recently deleted’ items or trash. It just vanished.

I made a dummy folder with a text file in it and dragged it into the ‘shared with all’ folder to check her story and sure enough it just disappears. On windows it stays there but warns you it wont be backed up.

Please can anyone lend some assistance in restoring these files?
Any help greatly appreciated.

Max

#2

iCloud should have a version history or trash bin that you should be able to restore those images from.

I personally don’t use the drive client for reasons like this. (I don’t want to elaborate) The sync client works just fine for many years for me.

Good luck!

#3

Thanks for the quick reply DarDanilo. I checked in iCloud and couldn’t see it in the folder or recently deleted items.

Unfortunately we are backing up photos from external hard drives. The total size exceeds what she has in her macbook so we need to use drive to upload and then delete locally.

#4

Not sure you’ll be able to recover your files, and it seems to be a serious bug in the drive client. But you shouldn’t drop files in the Shared with all folder. This folder should list existing libraries with permissions defined to all existing users. I think dropping in My library should create a new lib on the fly, but it wouldn’t make sense in the Shared with all one. Seadrive client should of course prevent writing here.

#5

Hi Dani, my thoughts too. Unfortunately I hadn’t given clear enough instructions and it seemed like a logical step to my wife. We have now created a library in there but we’ve seemingly lost a whole years worth of photos which is heart breaking.

#6

Not familiar with mac os enough, but you might have some chance to recover files with dedicated tools (like photorec, or maybe there are special mac tools to recover deleted files)

#7

Thanks Dani - I’ll be looking into it

#8

We’ll add a confirmation dialog for such operations in 3.0.5 version. The mac version is somewhat different from Windows version. With FileProvider, the files are not really physically files on disk. So if the files are moved into places where cannot be synced to the cloud, they cannot be saved locally. On Windows they’re real files on disk.

#9

Hi Jonathan,

Thank you for coming back to me on this. A confirmation dialog would certainly help. I’m not sure if this is possible but the best option would be preventing the files from moving at all as they instantly vanish.

We’ve had no success trying to recover the photos sadly. However we’ll still stick with Sealfile as outside of this the platform has been fantastic.