I’ve been working on a website for two weeks, and suddenly the file has disappeared - when I go to open recent it says the file could not be opened, and the file does not exist. I must have accidentally deleted it. It’s not in the trash though. Can anyone recommend a file recovery program that might get it back?
Your best option is to use Time Machine on your mac. This will enable you to go back to the date when you last worked on the file. When you’re at that date, search for the file and choose to restore it.
Are you sure you haven’t been saving your Sparkle file in the cloud?
Didn’t know I could save to the cloud - don’t think I’ve been doing that.
Haven’t got Time Machine switched on.
One possibility is that you might have never given the file a name, and it was always autosaved as Untitled. This kind of thing is Finder doing, Sparkle doesn’t really know (though there are ways to figure it out with some coding), and the file is saved to a system folder. This kind of works fine, until for whatever reason the Finder decides to remove that Untitled file from your recents. The recents list is also Finder-managed.
So anyway one possibility is going through the autosave folder. You can search for it by opening spotlight (the magnifying lens icon in the top left of the desktop bar), and search for “Autosave Information”, sometimes there’s just one folder, in some cases there are backups and there are multiple, so opening those will show some system files, including any “Untitled” or “Untitled.sparkle” files with a Sparkle icon.
Time Machine can be a life saver.
Suggest you use it.
I’m normally a Time Machine user, but this is a fairly new Mac mini M2 Pro, and I haven’t got that many files on it yet. I think there are some issues with my network and Sonoma, as the locations i.e. connected computers in the finder, seem a bit messed up. I think what may have happened is I deleted an older sparkle file with the same name that I thought was on a different Mac via the finder on the Mac mini, but I was actually deleting the current file on the Mac mini. I think I got that message where the finder says ‘The item will be deleted immediately. You can’t undo this action’. Anyway, going to create a start up USB drive with data rescue later today and see if it can recover the deleted file.
Couldn’t find anything in the Autosave Information folder btw.
I’ve given up and started rebuilding the site from scratch. Thanks to all those who offered help.