Huge Data Loss, Files Suddenly Deleted, Some Moved To Trash, Just One Peer

[thobarth]

Hi,

 

I already posted this as a ticket, but I think the case and possible causes / fixes are worth to be shared with the community.

 

Despite several feature suggestions which I am currently aggregating for posting them in the forum (as I am only allowed one post per day, it is difficult to create one post per suggestion), I experience a strange, scary phaenomenon, which caused a time-consuming mess on our server.

I created a shared folder for a large volume on an OSX file server, where several people are doing updates throughout the day via AFP and SMB. On my personal Macbook, I connected to that share, so I just see this one peer one the server.

I chose to not sync everything, so BTSync created the complete structure on my Macbook Pro, and kept updating it all the time, which took about 6 GB just for the direcetory structure, and was annoying and bandwidth-consuming. So I chose to "remove from this device" for every subfolder directly under the share, which seemed to work well, as BTSync created one .bts folder for each. Since then, I left everything untouched for several days, while the team was working on the file server.

What happened since then:

1. Although I did not change or delete anything on my macbook, several folders and files appeared on the file server under ".sync" in the archive directory. I didn´t expect anything to go there. This must be a malfunction, and is very scary. Some of the files I find there, are still in the directories on the server, others aren´t. Nobody knows why.

2. Today morning, after I was just online with my MBP for some hours, nearly all folders had been deleted on the file server. After one more hour, nearly all folders were visible again.

Then, in panic, I stopped BTSync on both machines, waited a moment, and started it just on the file server to be able to browse the log. In the log on the file server, there are many messages like "Remote peer added file" with files that nobody ever had changed.

We are able to compare and restore with TimeMachine, but deleted folders and stuff moved to tash without warning is not what we expect from the software.

 

I just had turned debug logs off on both machines, to evaluate performance during daily light background use, so I think I cannot provide very much. But as I read, seveal other people are experiencing similar issues in the latest release.

 

What should we do to help finding the cause?