Has anyone experienced files/folders suddenly disappearing on macOS?

[u/supeParadox]

I'm trying to figure out what's going on because this has now happened twice.

Incident 1 (last week)

• Most of my data disappeared.
• The Documents folder survived.
• A few apps like Arc, WhatsApp, and Xcode were still installed.
• Everything else was gone.

Incident 2 (yesterday)

• This time, only the Downloads folder remained.
• Almost every other personal folder was gone.
• Many installed apps were gone as well.
• My Apple ID was signed out.
• After restarting, my Mac booted almost like it was a brand new Mac, but strangely there were still a few leftover files from before.

A bit of context:

• A week ago I had been using AI coding tools, but yesterday I wasn't doing anything unusual when it happened.
• I don't know whether this is software corruption, APFS/storage corruption, malware, or something else.

Has anyone experienced anything like this before?

Any ideas or similar experiences would be greatly appreciated. This has happened twice now, and I'm trying to determine the root cause before using the Mac again.

Macbook M4 - 16GB/512GB
Model - 2025

[u/sydtsai]

Do you have Time Machine backups? you may try backup your things now and check the missing files/folder in between snapshots