Please help, bittorrent sync corrupted an entire folder (168GB of data) .!sync

[cutepuppy671]

After setting bittorrent sync to use a folder to sync to another system, I added a large folder and sent the secret to another machine, and now the files are corrupt.

I added a screenshot of what it did to every file, and removing the .!sync extension did not fix it, the files just have errors like this.

Is there anyway to recover the files, or am I completely screwed? (every file in the folder is corruptedin a way where they can not be used),

PS when the syncing started, it only synced a few tiles and then stopped (no action for hours)

edit: bittorrent sync now shows the folder as having 0 files, and nothing is syncing, and it does not seem to have an option to repair the files.

[GreatMarko]

.!Sync files are not "corrupt files" as such, they are merely incomplete transfers - however manually removing the .!Sync extension from such files will not necessarily mean you can access them again, if they are incomplete.

If you're sure that Sync isn't still in the process of downloading these files, you will need to:

1) Stop Sync

2) Delete all .!Sync files

3) Restart Sync

...when you restart Sync, it will detect that these files are not present in the folder, and should retrieve fresh copies of these files from your other devices.

[cutepuppy671]

The problem is that the folder with the .!sync files are the original source folder from which the secret was created. It was to be synced to other machines but only a few files were synced before the process messed up and the original folder is corrupt and my other system only has about 10MB out of 168GB

so other than whats in that folder there are no fresh copies

[goli]

Did your btsync process delete the original files without any notice or might id just have moved them to the .SyncArchive folder? If you didn't disable versioning and archiving, that's what I would expect. So have a look at your .SyncArchive folder.

Kind regards,

Stephan.

[cutepuppy671]

never changed those settings and the .SyncArchive folder is empty

[goli]

Then I guess you're screwed. Sorry dude. Go grab your backup if you have one. If you don't have backups, then you might have lost 168GB of data.

To name the kind of corruptness: They are *incomplete*. One of your hosts decided to be the one with the latest versions, the other decided to be the one that needs to receive the files. Unfortunately that was the wrong way. Maybe you have incorrect time zone settings?

As long as you don't activate the debugging feature by hand (by placing a file called "debug.txt" containing "FFFF" into your ".sync" folder. Obviousely something you couldn't have done accidentally), the content of the log file is close to useless. Since your files are corrupt now, activating debug log might not provide any information.

But anyhow: You could at least activate debugging (you need to restart btsync after adding the debug file), drop a new file into the shared folder and see what happens. I'm interrested in knowing if each and every file you add gets corrupted, too or if it's related to the initial synchronization process that did something wrong.

But again: I fear that nothing you do will bring you back your files.

Regards,

Stephan.

[toomanydata]

Download Recuva and do a deep scan on that drive.

[cutepuppy671]

Tried it and it did not find any files in that location, and scanning the entire drive only show other files not related to that folder.

[rdebath]

I would guess that there was some sort of permission, full disk or disk error on the 'receiving' system.

BTSync still deals very poorly with that sort of thing treating it's failure to make a change as an active user reversal of that change; ie if it can't create a file it pretends a user deleted the file.

Another nasty effect of this is that if one BTSync can't create a file and another can't delete a file they continually throw deletes and recreates back and forth.

Obviously, this is a very poor choice. A better one would be to treat the file as locally ignored.