Anyone Know How to find Missing Files on a Mac?

This is an external drive to use on both Mac and PC. I just noticed a bunch of a particular type of file are gone, most of the drive is there but predominantly important things are that one type of file. There's numbering sequences 1 thru maybe 9 with just the 5th or just the 9th present. Of course the old file I'm looking for is gone.

Is there a way to dig those up once the icon has vanished?

I would first suggest going to "Disk Utility" then perform "First Aid" on that disk.

If that doesn't work, you will likely need to purchase a disk recovery utility.

But first try the First Aid. You might even want to try to reboot your Mac in "Safe" mode (holding the shift key down upon boot) to see if that might force the finder to re-index itself.

M

If the drive or partition is used by both Windows & Mac it's most likely FAT32 filesystem formatted which both Windows & Mac understand.

I'd connect it to a Windows PC & try using a file recovery program like PhotoRec on it. This program is also available for Mac.

I’ve had this problem on my Mac before. It was when the hard drive was full. It must use some hard drive space as a scratch disc to show icons and file names. Once I freed up some space by deleting unneeded files or moving some to another drive, my file names and icons returned. They were always there I just couldn’t see them. It was scary to realize some data may be lost that was not backed up.