Disconnected HD, now folder gone

[artisfun]

I was in a hurry this morning and with the Macbook, 10.6.8, asleep, I pulled the cables for all the external HD's. On one of the HD's were various folders being managed by Espionage 2.8.12. The folder, Art, was probably locked but not sure. The external HD was then reconnected to the Macbook later in the day which was still asleep. The Art folder is not showing on the HD and will not unlock. The system messages indicate a renaming problem which makes sense with the folder Art missing from the HD.

I don't know what to do to recovery the folder. There are backups via Espionage of the folder but not sure of the steps since this problem has not occurred before.

[greg]

[artisfun]

Of course, this morning I start out to follow your directions about collecting the system log info and the Art folder opens just fine. Believe since the original post and this morning, the macbook was rebooted with the external HD's connected. Guess the recovery within Espionage worked just like it should. The one file within Art folder looks fine.


Below is the system log entries when I originally tried to open the folder about 36 hrs ago. I realize the problem is resolved but thought I'd post for informational purposes.
Oct 13 17:14:59 DreamWest-Mind fseventsd[35]: log dir: /Volumes/EspionageMounts/nb/3790953693/Art/.fseventsd getting new uuid: 60E7E21F-0E56-4E9E-A2AF-DC66F30C5B1D
Oct 13 17:15:00 DreamWest-Mind com.taoeffect.EspionageHelper[418]: /dev/disk5 Apple_partition_scheme
Oct 13 17:15:00 DreamWest-Mind com.taoeffect.EspionageHelper[418]: /dev/disk5s1 Apple_partition_map
Oct 13 17:15:00 DreamWest-Mind com.taoeffect.EspionageHelper[418]: /dev/disk5s2 Apple_HFS /Volumes/EspionageMounts/nb/3790953693/Art
Oct 13 17:15:00 DreamWest-Mind EspionageHelper[418]: ERROR (-[NSFileManager(TEAdditions) forceRenameItemAtPath:to:]:86): couldn't rename '/Volumes/OWC Exp GUID/Art' to '/Volumes/OWC Exp GUID/Art-saved': Permission denied
Oct 13 17:15:00 DreamWest-Mind EspionageHelper[418]: ERROR (safeRemoveFolderAtPath:1479): couldn't rename saved folder
Oct 13 17:15:00 DreamWest-Mind EspionageHelper[418]: ERROR (safeRemoveFolderAtPath:1501): couldn't safely delete folder: (null)
Oct 13 17:15:00 DreamWest-Mind EspionageHelper[418]: ERROR (unlockRecordWithPassword:1682): failed to unlock (/Volumes/OWC Exp GUID/Art): Couldn't unlock 'Art'\nCheck the log (see Espionage Help menu) for more info.
Oct 13 17:15:00 DreamWest-Mind EspionageHelper[418]: INFO: Posted critical message: Couldn't unlock 'Art'\nCheck the log (see Espionage Help menu) for more info.
Oct 13 17:15:00 DreamWest-Mind EspionageHelper[418]: INFO: removing ACL (16|2) from: /Volumes/OWC Exp GUID/Art
Oct 13 17:15:01 DreamWest-Mind EspionageHelper[418]: ERROR (-[UnlockRecordTask runTask]:77): Failed to unlock: /Volumes/OWC Exp GUID/Art
Oct 13 17:15:01 DreamWest-Mind EspionageHelper[418]: ERROR (event_handler:496): handler failed to unlock: /Volumes/OWC Exp GUID/Art
Oct 13 17:15:01 DreamWest-Mind UnmountAssistant[2587]: Volume unmounted successfully

Thanks again for a great product and I'll be more careful about ejected HD's before pulling the cables.

nancy

[greg]

Glad to hear it's working OK Nancy!

[artisfun]

This folder situation has been an interesting journey. Although the folder came back and was working fine, about 2 wks ago the folder disappeared again. And if I unlocked the folder, the folder would briefly appear in a Finder list but then promptly disappear. The following info is posted in case someone else has a similar problem.

The first guess was the folder somehow had attributes set to be invisible. This would be ok since the info would still be intake.
I downloaded TinkerTool which simply puts all the hard to find settings in OSX in one place. If you know where to change the setting in OSX to see hidden files/folders in Finder, you don't need TinkerTool.
Activated the "Show hidden and system files" and restarted Finder.

Sure enough, there was the Art folder with a . in front of the name. All the files were there.
I decided to lock the Art folder, then remove the Art folder from Espionage. The Art folder was still hidden afterwards.
Now the question became how to change the attribute. I've done some UNIX support in my past so I started searching the web for commands to get more info.

Opened Terminal window/app.

executed ls -al on the folder containing the Art folder. I was particularly interested in the permissions info, "drwxr-xr-x@", and what does the @ mean came to mind. The @ sign indicates there are other attributes set for a particular folder or file.
executed the following commands after creating a duplicate of the Art folder.

xattr -l Art which resulted in the following output
com.apple.FinderInfo:
00000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
00000010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
00000020

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo Art
Since I've already done these commands to fix the problem, I don't have the output. But the folder was no longer hidden after running the last xattr command and that is all I cared about at the time.

I actually deleted the backups for the folder under the Espionage Backups to start fresh. Not sure that was necessary but wanted to start over with the backups since I had no idea how the folder got hidden in the first place.

Added Art back into Espionage.

So far all is back to working as usual.

Hope you find this helpful
Cheers.