Hello

drfyt

Hi,

I am relatively new to Zettelkasten, and have already had my first disaster. In upgrading my macbook air to Big Sur, I lost all my archive files. But I am determined to figure this out.

GeoEng51

Welcome to the forum @drfyt

Sorry to hear about the mishap. Did you have any backups of what was on your computer or were you storing anything in the cloud (icloud, dropbox, etc.)?

ctietze

Welcome aboard, @drfyt!

Your story here begins on a sad note Do you have any clue whatsoever how your notes could've been lost? macOS upgrades on the same machines don't wipe the disk, so that's worrysing!

GeoEng51

@drfyt

Don't panic quite yet. When you say "archive files", do you mean text files created within The Archive program, i.e., in a directory that The Archive accesses? They would be a set of markdown or text files, one for each of your TA notes, all within one directory.

If you are talking about the notes that your created from within The Archive, I suspect the files are still there on your computer, just that your computer or the Archive has lost track of where they are.

Have you tried:

1. Using Spotlight, searching for one of your text files (or just searching for any markdown files, which normally have a file extension of "md" or possibly "txt")? That would let you find or confirm in what directory they are located.
2. Going into The Archive (under Preferences and then the General tab) and checking to see whether it is pointing to the correct directory? If not, you can click on the "Switch Archives..." button.
3. If using Time Machine, checking for previous versions of the folder containing your ZK files?

These are just a few simple ideas; it's difficult to know what to suggest without more information on how you have things set up on your computer, whether you use cloud storage, if you have some way of backing up your files, etc. And what level of knowledge you have about how your computer operates.

Can you tell us a bit more about your problem?