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Dissapearing FIles

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dknguyen

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I just noticed like today (wasn't there yesterday, and I didn't notice it this morning either) that a bunch of files (tens of gigs worth) has dissapeared off my computer. THey are on my torrent harddrive, and the only reason I know was because the Torrent software said that the files were suddenly incomplete and missing things. Some directories are wiped out while others are only partially present.

WHat would cause this? The only new thing I installed is Firefox, and I haven't noticed it anywhere on my PC. Everything else on the drive is still there. The only other thing I can think of is my computer is upstairs and people have been slamming the outside doors all day which shakes the floor-it's been especially hard today. But if something like that caused corruption on the drive, I would think the effects would be far more pervasive.
 
The men in black suits came by while you were out. ;)

I have a similar problem with programs just disappearing off of my system. If I dont use it for more than a few weeks it will completely disappear. No record or evidence it was ever there.
My Auto CAD, MP3 Rocket Pro, Lime Wire, Any media player that is not windows, any circuit drafting software, and often temporary files I have on my desk top. Two weeks and they are there, Three weeks and there is no trace they were ever on my computer hard drives! And this seems to happen on all of my computer systems too.
Its almost like my hard drives were swapped with different ones that did not have the most current software and related information on them.
I have since went to having multiple external hard drives that I regularly dump every ting new on too just to keep things from disappearing.

I think my men in black suits are just sloppy on hiding their tracks! :D
 
Normally it would not be such a problem because I have an internal and external backup. BUt I'm short on money right now and out of hard drive space. MOst of the files that dissapeared that weren't backed up already weren't very large, and most of the large one that dissapeared were backed up. My concern is if this was something that was some kind of bug in the torrent software or if it somethingn that could affect my internal backup drive.
 
I just noticed like today (wasn't there yesterday, and I didn't notice it this morning either) that a bunch of files (tens of gigs worth) has dissapeared off my computer. THey are on my torrent harddrive, and the only reason I know was because the Torrent software said that the files were suddenly incomplete and missing things. Some directories are wiped out while others are only partially present.

WHat would cause this? The only new thing I installed is Firefox, and I haven't noticed it anywhere on my PC. Everything else on the drive is still there. The only other thing I can think of is my computer is upstairs and people have been slamming the outside doors all day which shakes the floor-it's been especially hard today. But if something like that caused corruption on the drive, I would think the effects would be far more pervasive.

There are probably better computer experts around than me, but this doesn't sound like door banging. I'd run some basic drive diagnostics to check for corruption, (e.g. in Windows Explorer / Properties you can check for data integrity), and if the data is fine, then I would conclude that something running on your system has deleted these files.

If you have valuable non-backed up files there - disable the drive until you can back them up, the safest way is probably to mount the drive in a separate, non problematic system to back it up. Then as others suggest, run some decent virus scanning software, make sure your firewall is secure etc..

You may be able to get them back with the appropriate undelete software, again, to have best success with this you should stop using the drive.
 
Well the only software I've downloaded in months was Firefox today. It seems to have only affected my torrent drive which is separate from all my other drives which is really strange. I haven't noticed anything missing elsewhere. Most viruses normally target the system drive don't they?

Right now, I'm suspecting that it's some bug with the torrent software that causes it to misread and wipe torrents. Some people have reported vaguely similar problems, but more persistent. THis one happened out of nowhere.. A vast majority of the files affected all had one of 2 timestamps.
 
So what is torrent software used for ? Seems like standard FTP or download would suffice. What is the benefit of torrent?
 
So what is torrent software used for ? Seems like standard FTP or download would suffice. What is the benefit of torrent?

Mostly it's used for pirating software, music, films etc.

It's a file sharing system, you're giving access to others to download your files, and in turn you can download their's.
 
Mostly it's used for pirating software, music, films etc.

It's a file sharing system, you're giving access to others to download your files, and in turn you can download their's.

Well boo hoo for them then...
 
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Torrents are decentralized, aside from a server that just has to keep track of who has the files (the tracker) there is no central download site, so there's no server over head like with server based transfers. The users themselves form a dynamic network that allows anyone attaching to that particular tracker to download a little bit of the data from everyone at the same time, turns a lot of slow connections into one fast one, it's very attractive for cheap secure downloads.

If you think it's just for illegal software you've never played World of Warcraft, it's patch system is based on a torrent system. It's becoming more popular because of the lack of the large system overhead required with centralized storage, it's also fault tollerant and heavily encrypted. It is however because it's fully encrypted very useful for illegal downloading, all the data on the tracker server is hashed, meaning the server that the torrent is tracked from has absolutely no way of knowing the contents of what it's linked to, making it legally almost impossible to take torrent sites down.

DK, locate on the web the most up to date version of Combofix that you can find. Once you're infected it is the ONLY software I have ever found that can remove the nasty ones, if you have ANYTHING it will find it.
 
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Normally it would not be such a problem because I have an internal and external backup. BUt I'm short on money right now and out of hard drive space. MOst of the files that dissapeared that weren't backed up already weren't very large, and most of the large one that dissapeared were backed up. My concern is if this was something that was some kind of bug in the torrent software or if it somethingn that could affect my internal backup drive.

_________


torrent is a bad idea, it could be a virus, i recently recovered my backup, it was in a dvd but the computer couldn't read it, i use a tool that comes with nero to recover it, though i don't know if would work in a hard drive.
 
paul, everything COULD be a virus, this is why there are virus scanners =)
 
Boy hope DK's computer didn't get eaten =\
 
As I have found out from personal experience us computer illiterate ones are the most likely to delete something big by accident!
Part of my multi redundant back ups is because I am some times the direct reason an important or large file disappears!:eek:

I dont like having a fast responding computer system. It often executes a command and finishes before I realize what it is I just accidentally told it to do. :eek:
 
The problem could be much simpler.

It happens very seldom - but still occasionally does - that the FAT gets corrupted.

I suggest to perform a scandisk and defragmentation.

It would be helpful to know what disk space was available prior the data loss and what it is now.

The defragmentation rewrites the FAT.

Boncuk
 
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The disk space available before the loss was ~65Gigs, the disc space available after the loss was about ~84GB on a 465GB harddrive.
 
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If he's using NTFS (if it's Windows 2000 or newer he should be) that shouldn't be a problem.

Still the file system could have become corrupt but there's less of a chance of that happening with NTFS than FAT32.
 
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