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 /home/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.