unattached inode, connect to lost+found, ref count is 2 should be 1
 

I have a server doing its first (ever sadly) e2fsck booted into single user mode, and its going NUTS with the three messages in the subject of this post, for a lot of inodes. What do those mean? am i losing a bunch of data?

Hopefully not.
But whether you can trust the integrity of what you get out of it is probably debatable.

I treat fsck as a filesystem integrity tool, not file integrity tool. The two are not necessarily synonymous. In any such "incident" I treat the data as untrustworthy. Restore the (entire) filesystem.

Ah, that's a good point on how you treak fsck, I'd have to agree on that one, it cares more about the filesystem than the files themselves. Guess I was just looking for a layman's terms definiton of what an unattached inode is or how you get them? The server had an uptime of years, so it wasn't from the system shutting down improperly.