GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 521242
gvfs ate my irreplaceable photo collection
Last modified: 2008-03-10 16:25:59 UTC
Please describe the problem: I had a collection stored on a second hard drive of 3000 photos and 8 hours of video from a recent trip to 6 different countries, including some irreplaceable photos from a trip inside North Korea. There was enough data that I didn't have room to back it up anywhere else yet. Sometime within the last 3 weeks all the files suddenly *vanished*. I have been extremely careful with these files due to their high personal value, so I'd like to think I can rule out human error. The only thing I can think that could have caused them to vanish was that at one point I emptied the trash, which contained some soft links to files and possibly directories in the photo collection, and I recall the operation taking a very long time, but just assumed that that operation hasn't yet been optimized yet over gvfs. Is nautilus/gio/gvfs following softlinks when emptying the trash?? The hard drive itself doesn't seem to have any corruption, and I haven't actually written anything to the drive since I offloaded the pictures and video after the trip, I only read data from it 3 weeks ago. The softlinks were on a different drive, and I made the links in Nautilus for various photo organization tasks. I've hunted all over and the files are nowhere else on my filesystem either, so they definitely were deleted and not moved or something. Serves me right for running fedora-development on my primary machine. Running PhotoRec now with fingers crossed. Current versions are as follows, though I have updated a few times via yum lately. nautilus-2.21.92-2.fc9.i386 gvfs-0.1.8-1.fc9.i386 Steps to reproduce: Hopefully this isn't able to be reproduced by anybody, ever :-/ I tried a simple experiment creating a soft link and then deleting the link and emptying the trash, and it didn't seem to delete the link target. I'm not sure how else to try to reproduce this since I don't actually know what happened. Sorry this bug report is scant on details, but I figured I'd file it anyway to raise the alert of a potential problem, even if I don't know how to reproduce this yet. Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? Other information:
how did you empty the trash? did you use the trash applet there? what version is redhat using, the change they did to use gio had the bug you described, the upstream version doesn't have the issue though
I would have emptied the trash from nautilus itself, not from the trash applet. I don't quite understand the question about what version redhat is using, I listed the RPM versions that I currently have installed (latest rawhide), although I actually emptied the trash on whatever version was current 3 or so weeks ago.
This is most likely a dup of bug 513912. We were following symlinks while emptying the trash. This has already be fixed by Alex. I am really, really sorry to hear that your data is gone. I keep my fingers crossed and hope you are able to recover the photos and the video. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 513912 ***
Thanks for the reply, I'm glad it's fixed. I assume deleting non-trash links in Nautilus also does not follow the links. I got a few of the images back fortunately, though my huge DV files are corrupted. I'll send a donation to the PhotoRec guy to thank him for what I did get back...