GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 315994
Beagle has destroy my data?
Last modified: 2005-09-12 16:21:23 UTC
Distribution/Version: ubuntu breezy Yesterday I have installed beagle beta on Ubuntu Breezy (I have updated Ubuntu Hoary to Breezy two days ago), and after two hours to make beagle working and indexing my data, today i have see that i have lost a lot of my home user settings. I have lost all my email and all my gaim logs, but I havent lost my gaim custom buddy name or my evolution address book. I dont know if my data loss is cause to Ubuntu upgrading or to Beagle (the only two things i worked on), but is a strange thing to study on. Unfortunately I cant reproduce the problem cause i dont understand very well which program has deliberately "deleted" a lot of my personal data.
You probabbly used the beagle-build-index tool, which if used incorectly can delete some of your directories. beagle-build-index is a devil's tool, so be careful when using it.
Why an idexing tool "can" delete data? In my opinion this is not RESOLVED if I will not receive an exaurient and technical answer to why beagle-build-index can delete directory and why there is no advice in that sense on the Beagle wiki homepage.
Why beagle-build-index is a program that a user can call without any problem? In my opinion there is a big "conceptual" problem, an indexing tool shuold not delete the data (also if it is his rule). Cause the program is "together" with the other bealge "innocent" tool, could be necessary to call with root privileges (with sudo) or to change his name.
UP
I wish to point that I have my guilts cause i have "played" with beagle without reading the man; but i have installed the program from apt and i have read all the wiki site about beagle (pre-requisites, optional programs, faq, ecc.). I'm a programmer, a person enough expert and I can say like programmer that a program called "beagle-build-index" for me can ONLY build the index for beagle, nothing more, indeed no more, only idexing. I imagine the program is useful but if it so "evil" the program should be: 1) called with another name (beagle-scan-directory - beagle-evil-index); 2) documented on the FAQ, cause a someone can use without care as I do; 3) runnable only like root (sudo beagle-build-index); 4) advise in the quick help that can destroy DATA in the directory scanned. Sorry, but this is a big error of the programmers that has coded it. I dont want excuse, but I wish to hear the programmers that an error has been made.
Is good to see that a bug is putted to FIXED and in the real case is not FIXED http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314631 I have used the latest beta of beagle, not the alpha...
The problem was that the last passed argument to the beagle-build-index tool was considered to be the path were the index was to be created. So if you passed a directory with your data as the last argument it would at some point need to prune the index and therefore delete your directory. This has already been fixed in CVS. Now you have to use a specific option to specify the location where the index is to be created. You can close the bug if you dont need any more information.
In this case i wish you want to consider the idea to make beagle-build-index runnable only with sudo, cause this can prevent, I think, from accidental data loss. Regards.
This has been fixed in CVS for a little while. See bug 314631. This would be a good thing to add to the wiki. I sincerely apologize for the loss of the data. (Reopening so I can mark it as a DUP rather than NOTABUG, which it obviously is)
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 314631 ***