Teacher needs help! My students' Illustrator files vanishing, get "the file does not exist" message

[mr teacher 77734]

Hello! I have a huge problem that I need help with. I teach graphic arts at the high school level and I have had 5 students in the last few days have their illustrator files vanish. I see them every other day and they are assigned a local user account. Other students use the same computers, but they all log out at the end of the period. My students have been working on a big vector portrait project for the last 3 weeks, and they have been trained to log in, open illustrator, open their .ai file, then save it in their local user folder. 

What's weird is, all of the sudden some of them have randomly lost their files. When we go to click on "open recent files", we can see the file name (see photo - "jj.ai"), but when we click on it, we get the message in the other photo ""file does not exist": jj.ai"

We have tried everything to locate it. I've spent a ton of time trying to figure it out myself, and have had our district IT helping and we are perplexed. The missing files are random and I am always in the room when other students are in here, so I know there isn't any foul play. 

The most interesting thing is, the rest of their files are still there. They've done multiple projects and they are still there, but at random, these files are just vanishing. 

I've had to tell a few kids now they've lost all of their work. Praise the Lord they've handled it well, but we've all been there where you lose something you've invested a ton of time in and lose it so it's just difficult to tell them it's gone. 

I've searched online for answers and haven't found anything. I've tried all of the following:

-restrarting, relogging in

-searching the computer for the file name

-watching youtube videos for help

-going to the data recovery folder (the loss wasn't from a crash)

Thank you in advance for any advice!!! God Bless!!! 

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from cc desktop bugs">

[Monika Gause]

Personally I would not trust such a system enough to save my only version of important files on shared computers. Do they also have their own Adobe account or is this about their user account on the Mac?

I would get at least a thumb drive to save an additional copy. Thumb drives are not really safe either, but at least I have more than one copy. Or email the file to the home computer or the phone.

Back in the time when I was using a shared computer at design school, we all had our own floppys to save files. Personal accounts on those machines didn't even exist.