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My mother has a FileMaker Pro database she uses just about every day. ~Every purchase she makes she logs into it; she logs the hours of grandchildren who help her; every check she writes comes out of it, and she writes checks near daily. It's important to her financial life.

This file should be mirrored to iCloud. It's normally in /Users/mom/Documents/Foo/Foo.fmp17

(I have AppleScripts I wrote years ago that refer to this location, and which she uses weekly.)

My mother has two separate external drives attached to the computer with Time Machine running on them. They do not exclude any folders. They were down for the past 5 days (because the computer HD was running low on space), but they're back up now.

She has had an alias to this document in the Dock for years. Today she called me because it wouldn't open when she clicked on the Dock. With screen sharing, I confirmed. Cmd-clicking on the alias in the Dock said the file does not exist.

Yet, with Spotlight I found the filename sitting at the location above. It was offloaded from the computer. The Date Modified showed November 2019. I opened the file (waited for it to download from iCloud) and confirmed that it was 5 years in the past; it did not have any records for the past 5-ish years.

I launched Time Machine, and…it thinks the file does not exist before today. Stepping back through random snapshots going back months and even more than a year, other files are in this folder, but THIS file is not. I don't understand how this is possible.

I assume iCloud had a concussion and somehow gave us an old file, though I cannot understand why it would have offloaded this file. (She was running low on disk space, and iCloud is set to offload older files, but this one is nearly-constantly in use.)

So…whom do I contact to try and get the file back? To make things worse, FilemakerPro constantly updates the DB when you do anything. By opening the file from 2019 and performing a search, the file now has a modification date of right now, which concerns me that even if iCloud comes out of its coma, it will think this file is newer and better than anything it had sitting around.

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    I don't have an answer for you unfortunately; as someone who's also lost valuable data to Apple's sketchy schemes I'm commenting only to offer my condolences. FWIW, I now use a completely non-Apple backup system consisting of rsync and a NAS.
    – Seamus
    Commented Oct 2 at 6:47
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    My condolences, also. I read every sentence with a sinking heart.
    – bishop
    Commented Oct 2 at 15:47
  • That said, with this kind of database use and importance, periodic offline backups and recovery exercises are needed. A new holiday tradition, perhaps.
    – bishop
    Commented Oct 2 at 15:49
  • Have you checked Time Machine's actual directories, rather than the GUI? Plug in your TM drive, go to Backups.backupdb, your computer name, then you can browse each snapshot individually. If you are familiar with the Terminal, you can do something like ls -al /Volumes/TM/Backups.backupdb/*/*/Data/Users/mom/Documents/Foo/* to list all of the files that have been backed up. I would check both external drives.
    – At0micMutex
    Commented Oct 2 at 18:05
  • Time Machine also backs up iCloud data by default, so you can check with ls -al /Volumes/TM/Backups.backupdb/*/*/Data/Users/mom/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/... where the rest of the path is the iCloud Drive path. You can also go to icloud.com/recovery/ and see if the file was deleted.
    – At0micMutex
    Commented Oct 2 at 18:12

2 Answers 2

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It sounds like "Optimize Mac Storage" (Sonoma) or "Store in iCloud" (Sequoia) is active for the Desktop and Documents folders. Files in those folders can then be evicted from local storage and replaced by empty placeholders when local storage space is low, which you say it was. Evicted files are not backed up by Time Machine. However, I doubt that this explains your problem.

More likely, FileMaker deliberately gave the file an attribute that caused it to be skipped by TM. Because the database is always open for writing when FM is running, it could not be backed up reliably in a consistent state. Like most database software, FM has its own backup facility and you should check its documentation to see how to restore from those backups (if any exist.) You should also make sure that it wasn't actually saving data to some other file that you don't know about.

Update: The OP reports that FM was, in fact, writing to a different file as the result of an accidental duplication of the Documents folder that happened years ago.

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    FileMaker left running is very, very likely. That gives me hope to see if I can find a backup where maybe it wasn't. I also like the thought to check its own backup system. Thanks; I'll give you the checkmark if either of these pan out. I appreciate you taking the time to weigh in.
    – Phrogz
    Commented Oct 2 at 5:38
  • FWIW, FileMaker Server backs up the DB, but FileMaker Pro Advanced does not. I failed to specify which she uses. I was able to find a backup, but not for the reasons we suspected.
    – Phrogz
    Commented Oct 2 at 21:29
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So, here's what actually happened.

About 5 years ago iCloud syncing broke on her computer. The computer lost its iCloud account for a while. Excel, for example, suddenly complained that it couldn't save the files that it had open. Why? Because iCloud did something weird where the entire Documents and Desktop folders were no longer being backed up, but got duplicated inside of an "iCloud (Archive)" folder on her computer. 5 years ago I got this fixed, and we left the "iCloud (Archive)" folder sitting around just in case it had things that were needed.

Apparently went it went offline the file pointers (not sure what they're internally really called) went to the Archive location. So, compiled AppleScripts that referenced the FileMaker database continued to use the file inside the "Archive" folder. The alias in the Dock pointed to the "Archive" copy, and we hadn't noticed. Eventually iCloud (rightly) offlined the version in the correct spot, because it wasn't being used. And at that point, it was no longer being backed up.

Remember how I said that her hard drive was running low on space? I fixed that in part by deleting the iCloud (Archive) directory. I am (indirectly) the perpetrator. I deleted the version of her file she was using.

Luckily, once I went back 5 days in TimeMachine the iCloud (Archive) folder was there, and I found the (slightly outdated) copy of the file. :smdh:

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  • Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't completely wrong. FM was writing to a file you didn't know about.
    – Linc Davis
    Commented Oct 2 at 23:58

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