Transmission deleting directories full of downloaded files?
Posted: Sun May 29, 2016 1:43 am
Hello all... this is my first post. I did search for prior posts about the problem I'm experiencing ...I was unable to find a solution, other than removing Transmission completely and re-installing it, which doesn't really explain the problem, or give confidence that it's a meaningful fix.
I've been using Transmission on a few different Linux PCs/distros for a couple years and generally love it. My main torrent PC is an ancient Dell Inspirion netbook w/a lowly Pentium M CPU and less than a half GB of RAM. This PC was rescued from a recycling bin, an external 1TB USB HD was added and the minimalist CrunchBang Linux distro installed (now BusenLabs Linux: https://www.bunsenlabs.org/) and this little netbook has been running Transmission 2.52 (23304) great ...a bigger/faster/hungrier PC doesn't DL/UL torrents any better. Thus, this netbook is the one I leave on 24/7 and it routinely hosts a few hundred torrents at a time, including "longshots" some will probably never finish, but once in a while one does. I realize this isn't the latest version of Transmission, but the CPU limits me to a 32-bit non-PAE OS and this is what got installed with it.
I recently started experiencing the problem where Transmission directories spontaneously disappear (the folder where both the torrent description file and the actual file itself are stored: to stay organized, I put each running torrent in its own folder within a "TRANSMISSION_EXTERNAL" folder (to denote it lives on the external 1TB USB HD). At some point earlier today, inexplicably more than 90% of the directories within the TRANSMISSION_EXTERNAL folder simply vanished. Of course, the listing for each affected torrent in Transmission now displays in red text, and when I look, all I see is the "No data found! Ensure your drives are connected or use 'Set Location. To re-download, remove the torrent and re-add it." error.
Set Location is useless, as is Verify Local Data, since the directory that contained both the torrent description file and the file data appear to be gone (I've checked the trash and the entire external HD w/no luck finding any of the files, so they've probably been mistakenly deleted by Transmission and now unrecoverable). Of more than 500 torrents/directories, only a couple dozen survived the purge ...all happen to have been added recently, though many recently-added ones are among the disappeared. Among the now-missing are 53 torrents that were 100% complete, totaling 55GB of data, now apparently sadly lost forever.
I did find prior posts describing this problem at these links:
viewtopic.php?t=7380
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/700214
...but as mentioned, there doesn't seem to be much explanation. Thus far, I haven't (yet) noticed this problem on my Ubuntu desktop PC running Transmission, but my confidence in Transmission is shaken... today I lost hundreds of GB of data, much of it older, esoteric public domain stuff I've been patiently DLing over time and happily seeding to others. Foolishly, I didn't have a backup of this in-progress torrent data... the netbook just ran Transmission (it's only task) 24/7 w/o complaint so I got lazy and didn't pause occasionally to make a backup of the whole thing.
Can anyone shed some light on this? I accept that more than 500 torrent description files are now gone, along with 53 completed files and hundreds of other files in various percentages of completion. It's very disheartening, and my confidence in Transmission is not what it was. The similar bug reports linked above date back to 2008/2009 and involved other OSes (Ubuntu and MacOS) so it would seem that this problem has been around for a while and isn't limited to Linux users.
I'd feel a lot better continuing to use Transmission if someone can tell me this is/was a known bug and has been identified and conclusively fixed. It goes w/o saying that I'd love it if there were some way to recover the lost data (I haven't deleted the hundreds of torrent listings now displaying in red) but won't hold my breath on that.
Thanks in advance for any help/info/feedback you can provide.
I've been using Transmission on a few different Linux PCs/distros for a couple years and generally love it. My main torrent PC is an ancient Dell Inspirion netbook w/a lowly Pentium M CPU and less than a half GB of RAM. This PC was rescued from a recycling bin, an external 1TB USB HD was added and the minimalist CrunchBang Linux distro installed (now BusenLabs Linux: https://www.bunsenlabs.org/) and this little netbook has been running Transmission 2.52 (23304) great ...a bigger/faster/hungrier PC doesn't DL/UL torrents any better. Thus, this netbook is the one I leave on 24/7 and it routinely hosts a few hundred torrents at a time, including "longshots" some will probably never finish, but once in a while one does. I realize this isn't the latest version of Transmission, but the CPU limits me to a 32-bit non-PAE OS and this is what got installed with it.
I recently started experiencing the problem where Transmission directories spontaneously disappear (the folder where both the torrent description file and the actual file itself are stored: to stay organized, I put each running torrent in its own folder within a "TRANSMISSION_EXTERNAL" folder (to denote it lives on the external 1TB USB HD). At some point earlier today, inexplicably more than 90% of the directories within the TRANSMISSION_EXTERNAL folder simply vanished. Of course, the listing for each affected torrent in Transmission now displays in red text, and when I look, all I see is the "No data found! Ensure your drives are connected or use 'Set Location. To re-download, remove the torrent and re-add it." error.
Set Location is useless, as is Verify Local Data, since the directory that contained both the torrent description file and the file data appear to be gone (I've checked the trash and the entire external HD w/no luck finding any of the files, so they've probably been mistakenly deleted by Transmission and now unrecoverable). Of more than 500 torrents/directories, only a couple dozen survived the purge ...all happen to have been added recently, though many recently-added ones are among the disappeared. Among the now-missing are 53 torrents that were 100% complete, totaling 55GB of data, now apparently sadly lost forever.
I did find prior posts describing this problem at these links:
viewtopic.php?t=7380
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/700214
...but as mentioned, there doesn't seem to be much explanation. Thus far, I haven't (yet) noticed this problem on my Ubuntu desktop PC running Transmission, but my confidence in Transmission is shaken... today I lost hundreds of GB of data, much of it older, esoteric public domain stuff I've been patiently DLing over time and happily seeding to others. Foolishly, I didn't have a backup of this in-progress torrent data... the netbook just ran Transmission (it's only task) 24/7 w/o complaint so I got lazy and didn't pause occasionally to make a backup of the whole thing.
Can anyone shed some light on this? I accept that more than 500 torrent description files are now gone, along with 53 completed files and hundreds of other files in various percentages of completion. It's very disheartening, and my confidence in Transmission is not what it was. The similar bug reports linked above date back to 2008/2009 and involved other OSes (Ubuntu and MacOS) so it would seem that this problem has been around for a while and isn't limited to Linux users.
I'd feel a lot better continuing to use Transmission if someone can tell me this is/was a known bug and has been identified and conclusively fixed. It goes w/o saying that I'd love it if there were some way to recover the lost data (I haven't deleted the hundreds of torrent listings now displaying in red) but won't hold my breath on that.
Thanks in advance for any help/info/feedback you can provide.