Speaking of recipes...

[PeterB]

... my mom is going nuts because her entire Recipes folder has disappeared. Apparently, for reasons I do not understand, she was storing the folder on a BACKUP drive that I'd set up for her as an automatic nightly clone. I'm guessing what happened was that the clone lost the folder during one of the backups, though why this would have just suddenly happened now is again a mystery.

Searching for the folder on both the main and backup drives using Spotlight has turned up nothing. Is the folder gone for good? (A big part of the problem for me: I have no idea where exactly she'd stored the Recipes folder... all I know is that she has a sidebar shortcut to it, but of course it could have been anywhere... she has a tendency to not organize anything on her hard drive, all the files are everywhere... some on the desktop, some in her Downloads folder, some in her Documents folder, etc.)

She's using a 2012 Mac Mini running Snow Leopard. In fairness, I should also mention that she's 90... still, doing tech support for her has been a real nightmare, especially having to do it from a distance.

[Tiangou]

Spotlight doesn't return results for the contents of many folders without tweaking the search parameters. Don't trust that it's gone just because Spotlight can't find it.

If it's a Carbon Copy Cloner "clone" then did you have the SafetyNet enabled?

I'd use EasyFind to scavenge both the boot drive and the backup drive. Make sure that it's producing results for package contents and invisible items.
https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware

...You can screenshare to do this for her, right?

[davemchine]

I don’t have a suggestion but this is a good time for us all to remember the importance of an offsite backup. In addition to Dropbox I exchange backup drives with my dad every few months. So my backup is threefold:
1) Timemachine on-site
2) Dropbox in the cloud
3) Clone via CCC at dads house

I’ve been considering a backup to thumb drive on my keychain making it accessible when I travel or during some sort of unusual event.

[PeterB]

Yes, I am managing things for her at a distance with AnyDesk.

I don't recall if I had set things up for her to backup with CCC or SuperDuper... I will check it the next time I can.

As for backups ... she had both the cloned (backup) drive and a Time Machine backup drive that I set up for her... yet I don't see the Time Machine backup drive mounted on her desktop, it's possible she physically disconnected it or it has gone south. Even if not though, the problem is that the TM backup was probably set to back up her main HD, not the backup hard drive... so the essential problem is her storing things on a backup drive. I hadn't set up any sort of cloud backup though.

I did try EasyFind. That was one of the very first things I tried. No luck with it.

[Grateful11]

My wife would be freaking out if she lost all her recipes. Make me want to print all her favorites out.