Let me start this post by stating I’ve been in the IT business for almost 20 years.

Something very disturbing happened a couple days ago with our WHS Shared Photos. We use Google Picasa to manage our photos and when I opened it up recently, most of my photos were missing. So I immediately clicked on my Photos share only to find every photo/folder we had created is now missing. I couldn’t believe my eyes. This was gigabytes of photos.

I immediately ran to my wife and started ranting. She is the only other user with write access to this share. She is tech savvy so I couldn’t imagine her deleting everything but I had to ask. Of course she insisted that she hadn’t touched a thing.

So my next move was to locate some file recovery software and attempt to recover the lost photos. Several scans of the drive came up with nothing.

What happened??? Am I losing my mind? I checked all of the other shares and everything is still there, only the photos are missing.

Did you Remote into the system and check the folder share there? I have seen the clients lose the ability to see the Photo folder contents on occasion while the photos are still intact when looking at them thru the server. A restart of the client normally gets them back, although not always. There seems to be a bug somewhere.

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HP EX470, 4 GIG, 4200+ EE SFF, WHS V1, Production
HP EX485, 4 GIG, E5800, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Transfer Server, Backup Server
HP EX490, 4 GIG, Q9400S, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Mediaserver
HP EX485, 4 GIG, Q8200S, WHS 2011, ITUNES Server

Yeah, I tried to remote in but get the same results. If I check the properties on the folder it indicates only 98MB of data, which I recently copied there.

Oh, man, that would truly be devastating if they all are gone. I sincerely hope that is not the case. Were you duplicating your share folders between two installed hard drives? If so, you might want to scan both drives separately.

What about automatic file syncing? Do you have anything in place that automatically syncs those shares? For example, I use a tool called GoodSync to periodically back up my shared MP3s and JPGs to a separate WD MyBook external drive If not set up properly it is possible that this tool could inadvertently delete all that it was attempting to syncing (it actually could sync empty folders over populated folders, but there are a couple of safeguard options that can be used to prevent this).

The only other thought I have was that a few years ago I remember reading of a virus that specifically targeted JPG files. Given your IT background the chance of your network being infected by that would be pretty low, but still...

Good luck with this.

edit - deleted post. Saw your posts above about RDP.

This is the exact reason that I do not trust the server alone with my photos. I have an external backup that the photos get backed up to maybe once a month. Even though I have never had a problem with loosing data from the server, I would be devastated if I lost my family photos. You can never be too careful. I wish you the best of luck with recovering the photos.

By the way, the external backup is kept offsite for safekeeping. Maybe this is just my paranoia, but once the files are gone, it can be impossible, or atleast very costly, to get them back.

HiDef,

I feel your pain I really do. When I lose my pictures I go nuts. Last time it happend it was off an 8 GIG Memory Card I used last summer when I was in China. Fortunately I was able to recover the pictures but your situation is of a different nature.

I assume you have more then one drive in your Server and if not then the proceedure is the same. What I would do is pull the drives out and install them on another computer, they use NTFS so your other computer will be able to read them. Make sure you can see hidden files. Then simply look in the the folders. You will see several hidden folders DE is the one to check for your missing files.

If you are fortunate your files will still be in tact and you can copy them to another drive. I would do the same thing for each of the drives. If you happen to have a Thermaltake SATA Docking unit it makes the task even simpler because you can hotswap the drives.

I hope you are successful in finding your pictures. If so let us know how you made out.

Good Luck!

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Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

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