[mythtvnz] All recordings and LiveTV folders deleted on power cut (aka MythTV ate all of my recordings)

[Aaron Whitehouse]

On 31/07/11 16:02, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> As far as I know, MythTV never deletes directories, so it was likely
> not MythTV that caused the problem.  It sounds more like a filesystem
> problem, where the crash caused damage to the partition which was not
> recovered properly.  On reboot, did you see FSCK run and fix the
> partitions?  Did it fix anything?  At the very least it should have
> had to process the journals of any drives that were active at the time
> of the crash, and if that did not happen it could explain the serious
> damage you are seeing.  Note that Mythbuntu 11.04 hides fsck running,
> but it does tell you that it is doing it in the splash screens.

Thank you very much for your response!

On further inspection, I've realised that we have in fact lost a
seemingly random selection of videos, including quite a number of home
videos. The Videos folder had about 5 subfolders. One of these,
"Movies" was deleted. Most were not affected. Another was "Home Videos".
This was not itself deleted, nor its subfolders, but the files in Home
Videos and the subfolder (but not the files in the subfolder within
that) were all deleted. If it makes any difference, the small files
seemed to survive better than the large .iso files.

I've had a deeper dig into the logs and between the uPnP media scan
found 777 videos at 9:25 am and 668 videos at 9:55 am. As far as we
remember, and according to the logs, we didn't touch the machine in this
period (it was well before the power issue at 11am). As we didn't touch
the machine until after 11am, I assumed that it was the power issue. I
also watched the rugby this morning before 9am, so at least the
recordings were fine at that point. Curiously, the Videos are stored on
the main HDD, rather than the recordings HDD. To me, that makes it
unlikely that we are just talking about an HDD failure.

Are there any jobs or scripts that could possibly delete things in this
way? I can't see anything missing from anything that MythTV doesn't have
write access to, so MythTV seems the most likely culprit.

I've lost quite a lot out of this, but thankfully the Home Videos should
be backed up...(*touch wood*)

Thanks,

Aaron