Chosen Solution
I fell asleep watching Hulu (like I normally do) and woke up in the middle of the night and shut my computer.. this morning I went to do some work on it and is wigging out. At first it froze so I shut it down and when I restart/logged back in everything was gone. It was just my background picture with a notification about my finder unexpectedly closing blinking. All files in my desktop are gone. There’s no time bar or anything… please help!!
First thing I would try is starting up in Safe Mode by holding down the Shift key on start up. This may clear up your issue. Next I would try starting in Recovery Mode by holding down the option key on start up and select the repair partition then run Disk Utilities.
Well its not good ;-{ You’ll need to find someone with a Mac to help you here as you’ll need to make a bootable external drive to boot your system up with and then see if you can salvage anything important before its lost. Use another USB drive to copy off your stuff folder by folder (don’t over to it! Hopefully you have smaller folders to move otherwise you’ll need to breakup the move in smaller chunks of files. Setup a OS installer USB Thumb drive following How to create a bootable macOS Mojave installer drive I would hold off going to Catalina. Try using Disk Utility Disk First Aid to see if you can recover your drive otherwise you’ll need to reformat it and re-install your OS and apps. Do make sure you don’t over fill your drive leave at least 1/4 empty.
