help! files are missing

hi,

i just set up syncthing successfully (or so i thought) with a lot of support from here :slight_smile: now i have encountered a really strange issue…

certain files from my main machine (the one i was syncing from) are missing. however, this only applies to very specific files, so i assume this was not a general syncing error.

so this is my folder structure: folder to sync: /Users/me folder with all my music: /Users/me/Music/_music and from there it is /$band/$album

i have a rather large music collection and was therefore not able to check each and every folder before posting this. i did, however, check the ‘most important’ artists… here is the problem:

/Users/me/Music/_music/Chefdenker/

  • /album1
  • /album2
  • /album3

each of these folders is missing only the audio files. basically, i still have each cover.jpg and/or folder.jpg, i still have the appropriate m3u playlist files. but the .mp3 and/or .flac files are gone.

it gets stranger…

/Users/me/Music/_music/someotherband/

  • albumA
  • albumB

still displays all files i was expecting to be in those directories. but then

/Users/me/Music/_music/anotherfavoriteband/

  • albumUno
  • albumZwei

are missing the audio files again while still containing non-audio files.

so, either it was chance that each time i checked folders, the more important bands were missing audio files while not that important ones still kept theirs. or i must have set up a sync improperly and somehow only my important tracks have been deleted.

is there some way to recover my files? some bands i love are not popular at all and it might be very difficult to even find those files on the internet anywhere (especially live recordings that i cant just re-download from itunes or amazon).

or at least find out what caused this so i can make sure it won’t happen again? i have no idea around when those files might possibly have disappeared, so i don’t even know if logfiles would be helpful…

any ideas? thanks in advance =)

This sounds like a library moving files on one of the other devices.

If you have versioning turned on the files will be in a hidden folder called .stversion in the root of the share.

I strongly suspect you have a node that is moving the files into its music library and deleting the files from your share.

Some more info about how you share the folders could be helpful. What type of devices are they shared with? Are any of them using temporary/removable storage?

As Syncthing obviously does not know about the importance of bands to you, I suspect Kluppy is right to suspect another application on one of your devices moving around music on demand (you probably listen to important bands more often than non-important ones).

But most importantly: Whenever you put data that is of some value to you under the control of any file synchronization, do backups! Well, correctly this statement should be: Backup all data that is in any way relevant to you, no matter what you do with it.

Hm, I don’t really have libraries that are able to move files around. Most clients do not access the mentioned folders, and if they do, they do in ro mode.

However, I have switched settings so that my main folder will only send -and not receive- files until the first sync is complete (which will probably take ages because of the data volume). Once all files are synced, I’ll try switching to send and receive and see what happens.

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