Disappearing (or deleted?) files. All files. Every file.

S

samanthaorme

Registered
This sounds strange, but it looks like every file on my OS 10.1.1 G3 tower is being deleted. It seems to be pretty random, but every time I look more files are missing. This is not just document files - I'm talking executables. For instance, I no longer have the ln, ls and man executables, to name but a few.

This happened about a month ago, so I reinstalled the OS, and restored what I had from backup. Now it's happening again. I have no idea what's going on. My initial thought was that the hard drive was bad, but I have two hard drives, and both of them are missing files.

Help, anyone?
 
It's a web server - so there's telnet and ftp access. I also installed samba, and use it as a file server. But I'm the only user, and I locked down all remote access so that its limited to the local area network.

As far as hardware - I suppose it might be the cables or the RAM, but it's been running fine for 3 years with OS X Server. Never had any problems. I've never heard of RAM spontaneously failing - is that common?
The last time this happened, I ran fsck several times, and it always said the disk was fine. Unfortunately, the deletions got to the point eventually where the system crashed and I could no longer boot. I ran the disk utility from the CD and it too, said the disk was fine. I also put the disk into another OS X machine in an attempt to salvage data. It read the disk fine - but all the files were missing.
 
I had the same problem at the end of October and couldn't find a cause of the problem. For me, the directory structure remained on the disks, but all the files "disappeared." I was able to recover a lot of the files by using Apple's Disk First Aid. My system was running OS 10.0.4 at the time, since then, I've updated to 10.1. I sure hope it doesn't happen to me again!

Personally, I think it is a bug in the OS that is causing the problem, but I'm just guessing. It would be interesting to get Apple's perspective on the issue.
 
I had two similar problems a while back. I know it's kinda been a while since the last post on this, but i figured i'd add my two cents, and i'm bored.

The first time, it was 10.0 playing jokes on me. Files would disappear, but they'd still exist. I could make them reappear by opening them individually after searching for them in Sherlock. Hasn't happend since i updated to 10.1 tho... *shrugs*

Second time was a little more irritating... I was defragging, and my comp froze in the midst of it... when i restarted, it turned out i had damaged my cataloge b-tree... nodes were missing... and as a result, everytime i restarted my comp i was less a good 25 or so files. I ended up having to back up what i had left and reformatting everything... lucky me...

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Unlearn

G4, 9.2.2/10.1.1, 256RAM, 10GB HD
 
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