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I have been using Paragon HFS+ to get write access to my Mac HFS+ partition from within Windows 8. Suddenly half the files in a directory have gone missing.

A few months ago I copied the files onto an external drive. On discovering the files were missing, I went to copy these old files back to the same directory that has been partially emptied by Paragon HFS+, using OS X Sierra Finder.

However, when I try to copy in the files from a backup, the copy stops, saying there is already a file with that name in the destination folder. Yet the file is not visible with OS X Finder or using the ls -a command.

This gives me hope that the files do still exist on the drive. Somehow, while they are found by the OS X copy command, they are hidden from ls, sudo ls -a, and the Finder GUI. So I cancel the copy, hoping to find a way of recovering the data.

Any ideas how can I recover my hidden files?

How might they be visible to the copy operation but invisible to ls -a?

I have been trying to get help from Paragon's customer support. After 4 days they told me to uninstall and reinstall their software - it is as obvious on my support call as it is here that that is irrelevant to the issue. After another 4 days Paragon told me their software drivers cannot be to blame as they do not write to disks. I can't stop working for a week, so by now I have had to re-create the files.

I was running Paragon's HFS+ software for just 13 days before this corruption happened, and this is the second bug I have tried to get support for (the first was the software refuses to register). Neither bug has fixes or solutions, and they have refused to refund, let alone help recovering my files.

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  • Your method is not clear to me... If you have a backup, then are you simply fully erasing the 'suspect' drive & overwriting from the backup, or...? Have you tried restoring to a known-good drive instead, or directly to a Mac [eliminating any potential conflict in Paragon] ?
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 19, 2017 at 19:18
  • The backup is an old version of the files, so when the copy command tells me the file already exists, I cancel the operation, as I am very keen to rescue the latest version. By backup, I just mean I copied the files onto an external drive a few months ago and now, resigned to having lost my files, went to copy them back again. The warning gives me hope I can recover the data, and suggest that the disk catalogue presumably has a reference to the files but ls and Finder don't display them for some reason.
    – Chris
    Jul 19, 2017 at 20:38
  • I've added detail to the answer.
    – Chris
    Jul 19, 2017 at 20:47

1 Answer 1

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HFSExplorer was able to see and recover some of the files, but most were missing.

Paragon did refund my purchase, after a few attempts at looking at the output of OS X repair commands which showed errors, which apparently they tried to reproduce, and my refusing to send them a dump of my hard disk. I have had no problems with their OS X product to access NTFS drives, and have used that much more extensively.

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  • Well over a year of use and still no issues with accessing NTFS from macOS.
    – Chris
    Dec 27, 2018 at 23:30

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