SUMMARY Organizing and backing up files. Rebooted computer into Win7 OS and then returned to Kubuntu 20.04. The directory /home/user/Documents could not be found. This is approximately 6 GiB of data missing. Immediately shut down computer and started attempts at date recovery from spare HDD with R-Linux, testdisk, fsck. R-Linux and testdisk show intentionally deleted files from weeks before. fsck indicate no faults. No trace of the directory or files it contained can be located. Made read only image of partition and saved to external drive. Already had 2 week old image on identical HDD in same computer. Could compare the size of the 2 week old image with the corrupt directory structure. Two week image(with Documents folder intact via Dolphin properties: 51.5 GiB, 62,283 files and 5836 subfolders. Corrupted home directory(missing Documents folder) via Dolphin properties: 34.2 GiB, 85,234 files and 8279 subfolders. Using grep, I can find indications of the missing documents on the corrupt home directory, explaining some of the +23000 files and +2500 subfolders. The data is still in place but there is no index into the file structure. STEPS TO REPRODUCE Never seen before, hope to never see again. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Windows: macOS: Linux/KDE Plasma: 20.04 (available in About System) KDE Plasma Version: 5.18.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.68.0 Qt Version:5.12.8
Yikes, that sounds scary. However it sounds like your filesystem is in a corrupt state, which is not a Dolphin issue and it's also not something dolphin can fix. I would recommend asking for help online, if you're not able to fix the issue yourself. Also a good lesson in why backups are so important. :)
So Nate, what is the issue? Upon saving a file to any directory, it can be 30+minutes before Dolphin or Thunderbird or any other software application can see the saved file. Then, magically, it will appear right where I put it. This has been a characteristic of Kubuntu since the 16.04 version. All tools to access the health of this file system indicate no problem, smartctl indicate no hard drive issues, the OS was installed only 2 weeks ago after formatting / directory. If Dolphin and the OS are not the tools indexing the file structure, then what is(or in this case is not) doing the indexing? :-(
The issue is with the filesystem itself, since, as you said, it affects all apps. That's a sign that it's not an issue in Dolphin or even some software library that supports it. The filesystem of the disk is at a lower level than even the OS itself. I'm not an expert in filesystem troubleshooting, so I hope you can find someone who can help you in a user support channel of some sort. Closing this again since it's not a bug in Dolphin or any other KDE software. Good luck!