Bento was Apple/FileMaker's consumer database product that was discontinued in 2013. Its performance has degraded with each successive release of MacOS, but my wife has continued to use it on her MacBook Pro, up through MacOS 10.9.5. Today, all of her records vanished from with the Bento interface.
In trying to find them, I researched the default location for the Bento database, and found that it is supposedly in Home>Library>Application Support>Bento>bento.bentodb. However, looking at the file in that location on her computer shows a 1mb file that was last updated in 2013. Checking Time Machine backups for several months shows the same file, same date, same size in that location. Which doesn't make any sense, as she uses the application (and thus the database) every day.
I did a standard Finder search for the filename, and found only that one instance. But logic tells me that there MUST be another database, somewhere on the disk, that is the one actually being used. But I have no idea where or how to find it. Help?!
The location is right. That's where the Bento database is by default and you don't seem to have changed it.
Have you tried importing it to FileMaker 10,11, or 12? These versions can import Bento data directly.
Alternatively, the Bento Migration Tool can convert your Bento data to FileMaker tables in the .fmp12 format, which can be opened by all versions from 12-16. More here.