John Carter wants our attention now! "I just discovered that LION has a serious bug that Apple isn’t recognizing as a bug yet. Files disappear from the hard drive. Do a search with the keywords “files disappearing on mac."

"It happened to me, and it’s happening to others. I’m still looking into it.

"There doesn’t seem to be any fix in the future. Maybe Mountain Lion won’t have the bug. It’s totally random while at the same time appears to be completely selective. All the files in every subfolder of one of my folders are missing: e.g., folder A contains folders B, C, and D. All files in B, C, and D are missing.

"Other folders that I know should be on the machine are now missing — stuff that I put there just two weeks ago.

"Using Time Machine only helps if you actually use it. In my case, the folders and files in question were deliberately excluded from Time Machine — to save space in my Time Machine backup. What a shame on me!"

John concludes for now with, "Now, I recently worked with a client who has Snow Leopard, and dozens of photos disappeared off his Mac. No Time Machine backup. Another client also claims to have missing files — and he is not using Lion. So when did this problem start, and how widespread is it?"
Want to see John's posts on this problem on the Apple Discussion site? Find it here. He is posted as jrc39 and his comments are as of 7-15. Keep up the good work, John, and let us know the resolution of the matter.