Re: Files on external drive randomly deleted ? Yet still show up on df command

On Mon, Nov 04, 2024 at 11:04:58AM +0100, Sylvain Saboua wrote:
> About one week before when I woke up I saw that most of the files from my
> /mnt hard drive had disappeared. Public and personal archives, media
> collection... Nothing shows up anymore. 'du -sh' command displays free
> space, however the space is still used up as per 'df -h' command.
>
> #pwd ; du -sh . ; df -h | grep -E 'Used|fusefs'
> /mnt 122G .
> Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
> fusefs 3.6T 3.3T 328G 92% /mnt #
>
> Is there a way to diagnose the issue, and to keep/recover the (apparently
> still present) files ?

What you describe here matches the "files deleted but still open in at least
one process" scenario as Jay F. Shachter mentioned.

Diagnosing from afar is not really possible based on the available information,
but file system bugs sounds to me like a likely explanation.

Other possibilities include access by other users, say if the file system
is a network mount (sshfs, cifs or other), would that resource also be
available for reading and writing from elsewhere?

Anyway, fuser(1) might be a useful tool to check the real status of the
files in question.

--
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