Data loss on a FAT partition. What caused it?
 

Did you ever experience data loss on FAT32 partitions mounted onto a Linux system?

I discovered that contents of two critical directories on a FAT32 partition were wiped out. (Fortunately I have backups.)

If you believe that FAT partitions mounted on Linux are absolutely safe, then I'll try to recall if I did something wrong that caused it.

Please with me your experience.

Never had a problem with reading/writing to FAT32 myself. First thing that pops to mind is that the partition may not have been unmounted properly.

as i looked into it, it became almost certain that some files were definitely removed by the system, not by me unintentionally.

i added a line to fstab to mount this FAT32 partition at startup. the line goes like this:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win vfat auto,users,rw,umask=000 0 0

is there anything wrong in this line?

here's some more info on this data loss issue that i experienced:

i configured a virtual web directory on this FAT32 partition. is it possible that it's the web server who did the deletion?