"missing file" warnings -- how to eliminate?

Several times over the last week I must have accidentally moved a file from the EF library. (I’m still getting the hang of the software.) I restored the file(s), but I continue to get pop-up warnings listing the “missing” files. It’s clear that the documents referred to are in the library – so is there a way to stop the pop-up box?

Or is there a lingering problem I’m missing? The files I need are clearly accessible by EF …

The fact that EagleFiler brings up the Errors window means that the files are not where it expects to find them or that they don’t have the right names. If you put the files in the right folders with the right names (as shown in the Errors window) it will stop complaining.

What does that mean? If you click on “Reveal in Library” is it able to view the contents of the missing file?

missing-file warnings
I don’t know about “reveal in library” – if that’s on the error message I’ll try it next time it pops up.

In layman’s terms, the error messages refer to two pdf’s of journal articles. Those pdf’s are in the library – maybe they were once missing, but they’ve since been re-imported. (I don’t know the origins of the problem.).

The “Reveal in Library” button in the Errors window shows you the record in EagleFiler’s window that corresponds to the missing file. When you click on an error, it shows some advice at the bottom of the window.

There are two ways to fix a missing file problem:

  1. Use “Reveal in Library” (or “Reveal” in Finder) to find where the file is supposed to be, then use the Finder to move the file back to that location.
  2. Use “Reveal in Library,” delete the record from EagleFiler (and empty the trash), and then re-import the file.

It sounds you only did the re-import, so there’s still a record in the library whose file is missing.

missing file issue
Many thanks – that nails what I discovered when the error msg came up again. I re-imported w/out deleting in one case, and in another the file was missing (though it was in the Finder version).

I’m getting missing file messages, but the files are there. However, it looks like that in most of the cases, the problem is that EagleFiler is looking for something with a name that has invalid characters (e.g., : ) for a filename. The files open fine, but in the few I’ve tried dragging to the Dock icon, EagleFiler didn’t do anything.

I doubt it’s as simple as that. Please send me some screenshots of the error messages and the files in the Finder, or excerpts from EagleFiler’s log.

Done. There were a lot of missing file errors, so I just sent a few of them. However, all had either a : or a ; in the name (only one had a ;). None of them have moved from when they were imported.

Thanks for sending the information. EagleFiler is showing “:” in the Errors window, which I consider a bug—it should be displayed as “/”. However, I don’t think that’s the cause of the problem. At the Unix level, the file really does have “:” in its name.

The Web archive files that you sent have “” instead. I don’t know whether that’s due to the Zip software that you used or because that’s how the files actually are on your hard disk. If the latter, that would explain why EagleFiler thinks the files are missing. Perhaps you stored the files on a volume (or used file copying software) that silently renamed the “/” to “”? In that case, the remedy would be to rename the files in the Finder so that they have the names EagleFiler is expecting.

The files are on my internal drive running HFS+. The “" is in the file name in the Finder. I captured the web archives in Safari using EagleFiler’s capture. So, when captured, the “:” got converted into a "”. It should definitely not be a “/”. The big question is why suddenly EagleFiler thinks there should be a “:” in the filename when it wasn’t there from the start.

I don’t know. Are you sure that’s how those files were imported? I opened the New Yorker article in Safari and pressed F1. EagleFiler created a file called “A Critic at Large- Candid Camera- Reporting & Essays- The New Yorker.webarchive” (in the Finder, note those are hyphens rather than underscores), and the Title shown in EagleFiler is “A Critic at Large: Candid Camera: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker”. The file displays properly and verifies.

Maybe it’s a difference in how Safari captures in earlier versions versus the newer versions since I captured that quite some time ago. However, EagleFiler had the file in the library with that filename and now it doesn’t.

Presumably that file was correctly in the library before, since you only recently started getting the Missing File errors. So the bottom line is that either EagleFiler’s database was modified so that it was expecting a different filename (seems unlikely, since this would mean you were renaming the files in EagleFiler and there was a bug such that EagleFiler didn’t rename the actual files) or the files were renamed by the Finder or some other software. Now it’s probably too late to tell what happened. If anything like this happens again, please let me know.

This display problem with the Errors window has been fixed in EagleFiler 1.4.5.