Subject: myseterious, dissapearing data

From: Wagner One <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 14:49:20 -0600

I am running the latest version (testing) of Netatalk on several linux
machines here in our office. The Macs in the office are running macos 8.6
and 9.0 with their respective, included versions of the appletalk clients.

In one netatalk machine, I have a 25gb IDE drive that was becoming full, so
I added this extra, empty 9gb scsi drive that wasn't being used to my
netatalk config files and restarted things.

The drive came up in the Chooser as shared and I proceeded to transfer 4gb
of data to the new area from the old area. I left the old data intact thank
goodness!

Last Friday I copied the files from one Netatalk volume to another via a
Macintosh finder copy. The files seemed fine then, but when we came in this
morning we were doing our normal work on this new drive and the files just
disappeared. I had never seen this happen in the linux world or in the
netatalk world, so I just brought up a shell to verify that the files were
still there. They weren't, but "df" reported that an appropriate amount of
the drive was in use. I rebooted hoping that maybe the drive checking
utility would repair any problems, but the drive was still empty and, at
that point, "df" reported an empty drive.

I rebooted again and things seemed normal, so I copied the files back to the
new volume and there they remained for a while. At some point I looked at
the new volume and 3/4 of the files were gone and then, a little later, it
was empty. The funny thing is, I was accessing a file from that area (a
music file, so it was actively accessing it) and it continued to work even
though the appletalk volume was empty. Even a dir in the shell showed it as
empty.

The other netatalk volumes on this machine seem to be ok so far. I did have
a scare with the volume the files originally came from loosing it's custom
icon, but the files remain intact so far. I'm increasing the backup
frequency and hoping that someone might have some insight as to why this
might have happened.

Thanks,
Mike

-- 
[email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
"The ones who don't do anything are always the ones who try to put you
down." - HR

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From: Jon Knight <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 10:58:30 +0000 (GMT)

> though the appletalk volume was empty. Even a dir in the shell showed it as

The "new" 9Gb drive wasn't previously used as a scratch disc on the Linux
box was it?  If so, check if you've still got a cron job that's nuking
"temporary" files in that filesystem.

Tatty bye,

Jim'll

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From: Wagner One <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 07:17:29 -0600

On 2/24/00 4:58 AM, Jon Knight wrote:

Nope, it was previously another Netatalk volume. I didn't change anything
about it except the shared volume name in the Appletalk.x netatalk config
file and then reshared it.

I think I'll format it and give it another chance before I write off the
drive.

-- 
[email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
"Life will not break your heart. It'll crush it." - HR