OH SHIT! 17 GIGs worth of data just VANISHED!

the Black Monarch · Post by **the Black Monarch** » Sun Sep 07, 2003 11:39 pm

Not too long ago, the most irreplaceable files on my computer, Mothership, were backed up onto my external hard drive, Outhouse. This included my entire "My documents" folder, which had grown to a colossal 19 gigabytes. This was in preparation for the reformatting of Mothership. Although I did not actually reformat, I did defragment, which required freeing up space - so I deleted all of my Evangelion music videos. I felt safe in doing this, since they'd been backed up on Outhouse.

Today, I decided to go through with the reformatting. Since the last backup, I had acquired or created a few more files that needed to be backed up. While copying one of the new files from "My Documents" on Mothership to "My Documents" on Outhouse, the two briefly lost contact - when contact was restored, I was shocked to find that over 90% of the files in "My Documents" on Outhouse had completely disappeared, including all of my Evangelion music videos. Attempting to salvage what I could, I attempted to dump the entirety of "My Documents" on Mothership back to Outhouse, only to discover that - get this - Outhouse had about 8 megabytes of free space left. Only eight megs of free space, after it had just wiped out over 17 gigs! What the hell? But I would not be denied my backup, so I deleted everything that George and Jonathan had backed up on Outhouse in addition to whatever was left of My Documents to free up some space, and tried again. Now I'm encountering a very interesting problem. As soon as a file or folder is copied to Outhouse, it disappears - and when I try copying the same file or folder, it tells me that the file is already there! They're not hidden, since I have my computer set to show hidden files. I don't know if they're really there but invisible, or if they're nonexistent but the computer thinks they're there. If it's the former, then I'd hate to think of the possibility that the same issue befell my Evangelion videos and that I'd wiped them out myself when clearing space.

In short, there is no way for me to safely back up My Documents, which means I can't reformat unless I'm willing to lose files that I cannot replace. And if I can't reformat, then there's no way to kill whatever problem is causing my computer to frequently and spontaneously slow down to a ridiculous and unusable level.

To express how I feel right now, I'd like to quote one of Limp Bizkit's songs:

"It's just one of those days
when you don't wanna wake up,
everything is fucked, everybody sucks"

Thank Satan for shitty rock bands.

danielwang · Post by **danielwang** » Mon Sep 08, 2003 12:16 am

1) You aren't seeing the changes
Explorer? Refresh. Disconnect the external harddrive and reconnect, see fi that works.

2) Still not seeing them?
Open up cmd.exe (command prompt) and go to your external HD's drive letter. dir, or in Windows .NET Gundam, ls -la.

3) Hidden files
For example, each harddrive has it's own Recycler system, which means that if you didn't wipe your deleted filed, they sit in the Recycled folder on the external HD under a container object with your SID on it. You must manually remove the files.

4) Try this trick:
Type du for disk usage. Although it does sound unixy, you don't need Windows .NET Gundam to do this, only XP Home or XP Professional.

danielwang · Post by **danielwang** » Mon Sep 08, 2003 12:21 am

USB Harddrive? If they were there before you lost contact, the fstab or inode index might not have been written correctly or some other crap. Trust me, when I that language, you can tell this problem gets me annoyed as well...

What's the dish statistics show? If it says for example Outhouse is a 100TB drive and you'vve used up most of it, but Diskusage says you haven't something is NOT good. You'd use a fstab recopnstructer or go to a pro.

If, on the other hand, the other methods fixed it, I'd recommend a rewrite with confirm (ALWAYS use Confirm Write) to commit the files again. Or do an optical backup, we KNOW you have a DVD-R Mr. Monarch!

danielwang · Post by **danielwang** » Mon Sep 08, 2003 12:22 am

Oh,

If you can afford an external harddrive, buy more space.

Rozard · Post by **Rozard** » Mon Sep 08, 2003 12:29 am

Sucks to be you

wolf_hunter · Post by **wolf_hunter** » Mon Sep 08, 2003 12:59 am

Rozard wrote:
Sucks to be you

so mean, so true, so funny lol

rozard i wub you!

Pie Row Maniac · Post by **Pie Row Maniac** » Mon Sep 08, 2003 6:35 am

wolf_hunter wrote:
Rozard wrote:
Sucks to be you
so mean, so true, so funny lol

rozard i wub you!

What that guy said! Whats-his-name!