CIFS share files vanish

[Colin Conway]

Roughly every few weeks files and folders from two of our five shares vanish.

On one the folders are left, and just the files vanish, on the other all the files and folders go (apart from the .Trash-???? ones).

I just SSH to the server and copy everything out of the last snapshots and everything is good, but it's inconvenient for the staff who need the files.

It always happens sometime during the night, after the last snapshot at 11PM and before the first at 6AM.

I have snapshots turned on for all the shares (although they run at different frequencies/times), and they replicate to a second FreeNAS server.

One of the two affected shares is mounted READ ONLY on all but my computer, so I don't think it can be something deleting the files.

Build: FreeNAS-9.1.1-RELEASE-x64 (a752d35)
Platform: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz

Thanks in advance for any ideas. =)

 

[Robert Smith]

Maybe you have a misconfigured RSYNC or ROBOCOPY running on a client somewhere? Just a wild guess…

 

[cyberjock]

How much RAM do you have?

 

[anodos]

If it is CIFS, increase verbosity of logging and see what is going on when they disappear.

 

[Colin Conway]

Wow, thanks for all the ideas!

@Robert Smith - Possibly. I have looked into that, but it would have to be on my computer for the read only share to be cleared, as none of the shares are accessible without a username and password (and the passwords are very secure).

@cyberjock - The main server has 1GB of RAM; the 'Physical Memory Utilisation' graph shows it cruising at about 45-145MB free. About 700MB of it is 'Wired' if that makes a difference. Oddly, the secondary server has more RAM at 1.5GB. The 'Physical Memory Utilisation' graph doesn't show it going over 500MB used, mostly it's around 300MB. Do you think adding more will fix it? It seems odd that it has less anyway, maybe there is a badly seated second stick. I'll check that.

@anodos - Oooo, I didn't think of that! I'll give that a try to.

Thanks again for all the help! =)

 

[cyberjock]

Well, considering the minimum RAM is 8GB because of stability and sudden loss of all data, I'd consider shutting down the system right now until you have 8GB of RAM minimum. ;)

 

[Colin Conway]

Well, considering the minimum RAM is 8GB because of stability and sudden loss of all data, I'd consider shutting down the system right now until you have 8GB of RAM minimum. ;)

Wow, 8GB minimum?! Well, I'll try upgrading it and see if that fixes it. Thanks :)

 

[panz]

Wow, 8GB minimum?! Well, I'll try upgrading it and see if that fixes it. Thanks :)

Oh, come on: is there anyone who wants to read the documentation? Please! :)

 

[Colin Conway]

That computer will only take 4GB of RAM, so that's what it now has. I'll see how it goes.

I was looking to see if I had the latest version of FreeNAS (because the reports are not tabbed like my version at home), and I noticed it says the following above the download button (here):

Minimum Requirements for 64-bit is 4GB, but we recommend 8GB for better performance.

...that seems to suggest that I should be able to get by with the 4GB; at least until I can arrange some higher spec hardware. Would you agree?

Oh, and I have had the debugging logging on since it was suggested, but the file loss has not happened again yet; maybe the extra memory fixed it (although I literally only just got to 4GB, I was only able to up it to 2GB previously).

Thanks =)