H! All My Files Are Gone. They are Backed Up But I Need A Little Help

[Panax]

Hi! How's it going?

Something is definitely wrong. I'm not sure what my options are. When I finally had a chance to sit down and start my long journey back into production, I've been so busy helping my aging parents, I was greeted with disaster. I am so careful to take all the advice I receive here.

Everything looked normal but when I tried to listen to one of my old productions there were no files under every single project. I panicked and immediately felt I could just jump into my external drive and restore a time before the latest 11.3.21 update. Nope. Nothing! So I tried to go back and download a previous version, things got worse. On and on I tried. So I thought maybe this, maybe that, but we know how that goes.

After about a day I realized things were getting much worse not better. Now my plugins are not showing. The folder I made called Live Projects I keep my work in has jumped into the User library and SoundToys is in Places.

So I have an iMac, Ventura 13.4.1. I was afraid to upgrade because I'm so careful and organized. But once I again I kept making the matter worse by not writing before. Sweetwater told me they don't do files. Apple said you don't have a Virus but are you interested in buying a better computer.

I really am upset to lose all that work, it hurts and I'm holding out hope these files exist somewhere. But things are now moving around when I turn my head. Part of me just want to delete everything Ableton and start my whole learning journey again somehow justifying it would be healthy.

I'm preparing for the worst. iCloud shows many .als files but many are not available. This makes me want to ask if iCloud decided to do me a favor and throw out my stuff? Maybe it was a Black Friday plugin I granted full access to or maybe the one that crashed.

I have a pretty good idea you are going to say I just made the problem much worse by not asking sooner and now have many dangerous files throwing a party in my iMac.

I have a Lacie external but maybe I don't know the steps to restore or find anything. What would you do? Don't feel bad if you tell me to find a different field. I know. I really did some good work over my three years, I swear.

Thank you for any advice!

(I will try my best to answer any questions but I must warn you I need to be spoken to like a 4-year-old when it comes to this stuff.)

Panax

[Djard]

Have you run a search for the files, using a third-party search app, like UltraSearch that does a better job of finding files (and much faster)? If you use a file manager, you may have accidentally moved the missing files to another subdirectory. If you do not have a good File Recovery program, you can try restoring your computer to an earlier date, save the lost files to a USB drive then restore your system back to the current date. I use Acronis to backup my PC as well as routinely back up to a third external drive. I also use cloud storage but do not trust it. Nothing beats a manual backup to an external USB drive after every major edit.