Aaaah fuck, my raspberry pi seems to have crashed while receiving a file transfer and now the whole directory the file was going into has just vanished from the HDD. what the actual fuck, give me my movies back
@spinflip Has happened to me many times. You can try all the Linux disk recovery utilities, but they would have been automatically used without you knowing it.
@hasmis any idea what causes it? Most of the directory structure is still there, the files are just Gone
@hasmis also, in what sane world can a crash while SFTPing a single file to a large directory kill everything else in the same directory
@spinflip No idea, but it should be a journaled file system. That means every attempt has been made to recover it. Probably a hardware fault, in which case you are screwez vou'd. But, nice people will tell you to try fdisk, and fschk. Reformat and download again.
@spinflip Hold everything. I just remembered that you cannot run an active Linux file system on the raspi 'bestbuy' micro sd. Those things scratch up like a vinyl record. Only so many read/writes. I program raspis all the time, and I stream data out. I have all my media files on magnetic disks.
@hasmis no, this was on an ext4 external disk hdd
@spinflip Wow, I find these are impossible to muck up -- kernel panics, power failures, etc. Buy a lottery ticket.
@spinflip Try using recovery software like Recuva or WinHex. Best of luck. PS Always make backups. Boring but essential!
@iankenway I'll be trying that soon, and I have *most* of the files backed up but not quite all. But the larger thing I'm concerned about: what sort of failure mode wiped out 800gb of files without any warning, from what should have been a simple operation? And how often can I expect this to happen in future?
@spinflip I hope you're making progress with recovering your files. It can be a slow and fraught process. Maybe you could air your concern(s) on a Raspberry Pi Forum (I'm sure there must be one). If you have doubts about the disk's surface integrity, I would thoroughly recommend Gibson's SpinRite V6.00 Release 1. It's proved a life saver on several occasions. If you need more info or help about this, just let me know.
@iankenway turns out it was just a file system integrity issue, and fsck brought back everything with minimal effort.
@spinflip Glad to hear the good news but always make backups. Always! Best Ian
@iankenway thank you, and I do semi-regularly! This one's a bit difficult, as it's a media box with a few TB of video that could all be replaced without *too* much effort if needed
Update: plugged the HDD into a Debian VM on my laptop, couldn't mount the drive, fsck'd it aaaaaaand… everything is fine and back where it should be!