Hard disk vanished! What happened?
Something weird just happened while I was doing some backups from /dev/sda to an external disk with rsync over USB.
I have a program that monitors changes in a certain folder in /dev/sdb. The program itself is not relevant to this story except that it popped up a window and told me that the folder could not be found. I frowned and checked. The folder was there, but empty. There should have been many folders and files in it.
So I opened another Koqueror window and realized the whole landscape was rather strange. Many directories were missing. Apparently, they all had been deleted! I wasn't in horror because I do have backups, but how did that happen under my nose while I was doing backups??? I felt guilty, I must have done something stupid! I rechecked the rsync line I had just run and no, it didn't seem to have any harmful potential:
time rsync -auHvx --delete /home/luc /media/homebackups/
Although I had used --delete, /home/luc is on disk sda and /media was the external USB disk. The missing disk was /dev/sdb.
Then I checked 'df -h'. The hard disk was there and full to the brim. It didn't look like anything had been deleted. But I could no longer find about 90% of its folders, either with Konqueror or command line. They were all gone!
I decided to unmount it. It is an encrypted disk, but I didn't run 'cryptsetup luksClose', I just unmounted it. Successful. Then I tried to mount it again... no dice! I could see it under /dev/mapper, but it wouldn't mount (and I forgot the error message). I was afraid it might have crashed. I ran 'fdisk -l' and... it was gone! Oh, no. That was it, my disk had crashed!
So I rebooted and the BIOS could find the disk as usual. I restarted the system and... the disk is running, all folders are accessible again, it's like nothing unusual ever happened.
I had never seen or heard about anything like that. Have you?
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