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RiSE · Dec 7, 2004, 03:16 AM

I went to view some pictures on my iphoto today and all my photos are gone! along with all the music files i had in my itunes. Also my bookmarks are gone on safari! Anybody know what could have caused this and if there is a way to find them? I searched my computer but came up with nothing.

Randman · Dec 7, 2004, 03:28 AM

Hope you had a good backup plan in place.

RiSE · Dec 7, 2004, 03:54 AM

Its almost like all the "mac" stuff was reset to nothing! And i dont have any back ups of the pictures. I have the mp3's on my ipod but i dont know how im going to get them back on my mac!

Spheric Harlot · Dec 7, 2004, 05:05 AM

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say you ran out of space on your hard drive.

When the system runs out of space for virtual memory, open applications cannot write their preferences to the disk (since it is full), so everything is reset to "virgin" state.
OS X 10.2 doesn't warn you of this. OS X 10.3 (Panther) DOES warn you that you're running out of space, and it does so for a reason. If you were warned and ignored the warning: Now you know why.

Make sure you always have AT LEAST 700-800 MB of free space.

Or are you saying that there is nothing in your Pictures and Music folders in your home folder?

That would be a different problem, since the above situation only erases preferences, but no actual data files - your iPhoto library should still be in the Pictures folder, and your music in the Music/iTunes/ folder.

-s*

chris v · Dec 7, 2004, 11:13 AM

It's possible that the directory is corrupt. I had my applications folder show zero items all of a sudden one day. DiskWarrior fixed that right up.

You could try running fsck on startup (instructions posted here many times-- do a search) if you don't have access to a DiskWarrior CD.

RiSE · Dec 7, 2004, 03:23 PM

Originally posted by Spheric Harlot:
If I had to venture a guess, I'd say you ran out of space on your hard drive.

When the system runs out of space for virtual memory, open applications cannot write their preferences to the disk (since it is full), so everything is reset to "virgin" state.
OS X 10.2 doesn't warn you of this. OS X 10.3 (Panther) DOES warn you that you're running out of space, and it does so for a reason. If you were warned and ignored the warning: Now you know why.

-s*

I defintly didnt run out of HD space and my images and mp3s are defintaly gone from my itunes and iphoto! Im going to try running fsck and see what i can come up with.

Apfhex · Dec 7, 2004, 06:12 PM

Sounds like your user account somehow got reset, if you lost you pictures, music, and Safari bookmarks. All things stored in your user folder. I don't know how that would be possible, but it seems like that's what you described.

RiSE · Dec 7, 2004, 07:32 PM

yeah thats what seemed to happen because my desktop picture reset and my toolbar settings were reset! Is it possible a folder got moved or something? Last thing i remeber i was view pictures in ACDsee.