Noodlesoft Forums

On my Mac Mini M1, running Big Sur 11.5.2, and Hazel 5.0.7 (long time fan, btw), every time I logout of my user account or reboot my computer, I get a "Recovered Files" folder added to my Trash folder.

Today, the Recovered Files folder has 3157 items in it, all of them folders named "NSIRD_hazelworker_xxxxxx", each with apparently one single file in them, a .zip file, named "hazelworker-ddddd.zip" (replace the x's with random characters and the d's with random digits).

The zip files seem to be files that Hazel was supposed to have deleted in the past. An example is "hazelworker-20355" contains a medical record PDF of a client of mine that was deleted by Hazel back in NOVEMBER of last year. (I spot-checked 5 of them and they are all various medical records from clients, I did not check all 3159 of them).

This is a huge problem. I've ignored it for a while because it's easy to just manually empty the trash and make the files all go away, but they come back with the next reboot. And did I mention it's a medical record? I need to know:

(1) where/how hazel is secretly storing these records so I can go in and clean them out because they should be gone completely. and
(2) how do I get hazel to stop doing this. It makes the whole program kind of unusable for me, and it's an important part of my workflow that I don't want to give up.

Thanks for any help you can give me to help me solve this mystery.

I don't think Hazel is doing this, at least not directly (unless you have a rule that is set up to do this). Searching around, it seems it might be a function of the OS: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-hel ... lp2919/mac

I'm wondering if you are either killing Hazel processes or if the Hazel processes are crashing.

i'm not doing it on purpose.

Hazel is set to archive (make .zip files) of those pdfs, and then it's set move those zip files to the trash after a certain number of them exist. I think i keep the most recent 5 where I can get to them.

but the real question for me is if hazel is set to delete them so there are never more than the 5 most recent ones in the folder, then why does the "recovered files" have hundreds of them going back to last fall?

Except for this bizarre behavior, exactly what I expect to happen is what is happening. So how can I get to the bottom of it? will something show up in the console somewhere?

it happens when I log out of my account on the mac or when I reboot the mac. every time. and the recovered files are growing.

Check the logs by going to Help->View Logs. See if you can find any messages about hazelworker exiting or if there are any errors/crashes.