Vanishing sidecar files and lost edits

DxO PhotoLab macOS topics
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I’m currently using DxO PhotoLab 9.4.1.38 under macOS 26.3. But since December, I’m experiencing randomly vanishing .dop files. Last night I edited 14 DNG files - all with .dopbut this evening five of the sidecar files have just vanished and all the edits are lost!

FWIW, I store my DNG and associated sidecar files in a directory that’s on iCloud. I’ve been using DxO PhotoLab for about three years and this has just started happening in the last few months.

I have both automatically import and export sidecars checked (and, yes, I’ve raised a ticket with DxO support).

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This sounds suspiciously like your iCloud sync settings, nothing to do with DxO.

Have you updated the OS recently?

Have you tried looking at Time Machine backups? I would be very dubious about only relying on automatically synced storage.

Might this post give you some ideas? https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/415070/a-bunch-of-seemingly-random-files-disappeared-from-my-mac

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I would never trust cloud storage for critical files. Always save locally.

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Hi Joanna and Andy, thanks for your responses. The reason I think it’s DxO related is that I use iCloud backed directories for lots of other things. That said, there may be something about these sidecar files that trips up iCloud.

Files in these directories are stored locally, but I think Joanna’s suggestion to use Time Machine might supply additional safety and, whatever the root cause, should mitigate these issues.

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Previous PL was not offload to iCloud aware which caused DxO to interpret the dop files as orphans and delete them. Even though the raw was visible for you.

The feature in macOS to visualise and cloud file locally appeared not to be parsed correctly by PL.

Cloud storage over all is very often extremely disruptive and often the root cause of lots of trouble for applications, backup systems and those apps accessing and writing files on certain ways.

Trying to avoid all direct application access to cloud stored files is the best option before full compatibility can be ensured.

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The feature in macOS to visualise and cloud file locally appeared not to be parsed correctly by PL.

That’s a really interesting insight and I’ll move my edits to a non-iCloud directory to see if that resolves things.

Thanks to all!

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Files can be kept locally and in the cloud, depending on how the respective preference is set. It’s in the cloud settings and it’s about keeping files locally if there is enough space. (Can’t add a screen though, I’ve temporarily disconnected my Mac from iCloud.)

The local copies are in a folder (iCloud) in the Library folder (hidden by default) and one can access that ”iCloud” folder with PhotoLab. Have tested it a while ago, but with macOS Sonoma.