[SOLVED] where did my files go?

timl · 08-08-2014, 08:22 PM

Hi,

I am planning to migrate from Centos6.5 to 7 shortly. Before that I wanted to move the contents of my backup disk to a new location.

I plugged in the disk and formatted it. In my fstab I have a commented mount point /mnt/extend which I use for new disks.
I added the UUID of the new disk to this and mounted.
I kicked off the rsync from old mount point to new and it crashed after a while. I didn't bother to note down the error.
Hmmm, I didn't remove the comments in fstab so /mnt/extend was still in limbo.
I removed the comment, mounted and I could see a fresh disk with just lost+found. Started to rsync again and all was good.

Now, I am curious to know...where did the files go when I originally used rsync to copy from old mount point to new mount point (which at the time was not pointing anywhere)? I can't see them on the system anywhere.

Cheers

frankbell · 08-08-2014, 08:30 PM

It sounds as if they went to /dev/null.

If you remember the name of one of the files, you could try using the locate command. You might have to run updatedb (as root) first. See man locate for details.

descendant_command · 08-08-2014, 08:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by timl

where did the files go when I originally used rsync to copy from old mount point to new mount point (which at the time was not pointing anywhere)?

...but still existing as a regular directory - so that's where they went - likely filling your root partition and causing the abort.

Quote:

I can't see them on the system anywhere.

Because the external volume is now mounted "over the top" of them.

timl · 08-09-2014, 12:13 AM

thanks for the responses. locate doesn't find the files but as descendant_command highlights, that is because I have mounted a volume over the top of them. If I "umount" the volume then I can see the files in /mnt/extend and, yeah, root does look quite full.

So I umounted the volume on /mnt/extend and then deleted the files on what is now /mnt/extend. Bingo, a bit more free space.

And all the files are still present when I mount the volume again