Raspi resets itself when rebooted, loses all modifications
 

When I reboot my raspberry pi (Raspbian) all files + directories that I create, modify or delete; are reset back to how they were (if they existed).

I discovered this when I wanted to remove a program from crontab. When I rebooted the pi, the program still ran, and crontab wasn't as I had last saved it. Crontab had reverted back to it's previous state.
If I create a file, ~/foo.txt, it'll be gone when I reboot the pi.
If I modify an existing file, it'll revert back once the pi reboots.

I can create, modify and run bash scripts, but they go when I reboot.

The last modification date on the files in ~/ are back in July and I can't remember what I may have done that long ago.

I don't see any unusual commands in ~/.bash_history (also reverts when the pi reboots)

The pi is running as a simple headless server.

Thanks for any help.

would be nice to describe what did you install exactly and how. Did you make any special configuration?

Hi.
uname -a returns cat /etc/issue.net returns I wasn't installing anything new, just commenting out btsync from crontab so that I could remove it and install resilio.
My other pis don't exhibit this 'feature'.

I can't see anything in history that's been installed, or modified that would've caused the problem.

Try to inspect any process and cron tabs? ps might yield some strange processes there. Can you 'touch' a few files and see what happens after rebooting?

If I create a file, it will be gone after reboot.
If I modify a file, it will revert to it's previous state after reboot.
If I delete a file, it will return after reboot.

My problem is that I don't know what processes might be causing this issue.
I suspect that it's either something in the shut down process, or the boot up process, but am not well-versed in those processes.

thanks.

is not an answer. What did you download/install, how it was configured ..... How this system was created?

what is in /etc/fstab?

/etc/fstab

what I can imagine is: the card is readonly and you modified only a virtual filesystem, not the original one on the card.
But there can be other reasons. Probably you can find related info in /var/log (after boot).

OK.
I double, double-checked the SD card write-protect switch, and it is definitely not write-protected.

Here's the output of ls -alt /var/log | head -n 20
I presume something from Jul 19 will be helpful?

Thanks

Are you sure you're not writing to a tmp directory (ie /tmp, /var/tmp)? Can you post output of mount?

Certainly,
thanks

I would check messages, syslog, probably kern.log and daemon.log and bootlog too (and dmesg).
Once upon a time I had a reader wich "automagically" pushed the switch on the card to readonly every time I inserted a card into it. So I probably I would try another reader to check the card itself.

Ok, now we're hitting the limits of my Linux knowledge.
What am I looking for in these logs?

I have no idea, but error messages: lines containing the words error, failed, cannot or similar. If you are in doubt probably you can post them.

I noticed that / is pointed at /dev/root. I'm quite curious to know if /dev/root (which must be a symlink) actually points to the intended root device.