Subject: mysterious, dissapearing data [TAKE TWO]

From: Wagner One <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2000 12:53:49 -0500

I posted this a few months ago and never received any kind of resolution or
explanation as to why this may have happened. At the time I was expanding
this shared volume and, after the initial incident, moved the files to
another machine entirely. All was well until today. One minute the files on
the Netatalk volume were there, the next they weren't. It is a very
controlled environment and only two people have access to this shared drive.
I will add updates in the following, original post that described the
problem the first time it happened on the original machine. Any suggestions
or help would be very appreciated. Thanks.

> 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.

same... though the only two machines accessing the troubled volume are
running 9.0 and 9.04

> 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 new scenario includes a totally new machine and a 36gb U2/LVD drive...

> 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.

Same deal all over again. I recommend backing up any data stored on netatalk
shared volumes. Unfortunately, this data was not mission critical, so it was
not on a backup schedule. Ugh! I tried running e2fsck on the drive and it
came up clean. The files are just gone. This only happens, so far, on file
areas being shared via netatalk. I have not seen evidence of it happening
anywhere else on any of the machines I run linux on... ever. Almost 30gb
gone in a flash and seemingly no way to recover it.

Is there a tool for linux/ext2 filesystems to "recover" lost data... similar
to an undelete utility?

> 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.

This time, of the few remaining files/directories on the machine after the
incident, the only remaining dirs/files were, once again, those that were
actively in use... as if it couldn't remove them when whatever happened
happened.

> 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 for any information whatsoever... this is very troubling. I think, at
this point, I am going to give up on netatalk as a viable means to share
data.

While we lost a significant amount of data this morning, it was not mission
critical and can be recreated. Just lost time and work. Our fault for not
backing this drive up. I can't have it happen even on drives that are being
archived daily for downtime isn't really an option...

And I was so jazzed about netatalk. Now I have to rethink and *shudder*
expand the Ushare licensing.

-- 
[email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
...the carcass of a once glorious empire...