files mysteriously go missing. why?

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files mysteriously go missing. why?

httpwebwitch

4:49 am on Apr 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

I host many of my smaller sites on a rented VPS. Occasionally - it's happened at least 4 times I know of - files on the server disappear. There's no rhyme or reason to it; one time it was a subdomain alias file and all my email stopped working, just recently it was an .htaccess file which caused a whole site to go fubar, the scripts weren't parsed by PHP, my source code got indexed; now my valuable source code is "out there" and my formerly solid #1 Google ranking has tanked.

Understandably, I'm furious. I used some rather impolite language with my hosting provider's customer service staff.

My hosting provider has no idea how or why it happened. They say maybe CPANEL did something bad. Other than that, they haven't a clue nor an inkling.

Has this ever happened to you?

tangor

5:20 am on Apr 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

I've had some hosted solutions fail from missing files, but they were fixed (usually within hours) by the system backups. Then again, I don't go with bargain basement hosting, so that might explain the fairly good uptime.

lammert

12:22 am on Apr 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

My first guess is a problem with the file system integrity not directly related to the VPS setup. Can you access the command line and give the command mount there? This will produce a list with your currently mounted devices. The line with your virtual hard disk device should give the type of the file system (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, etc) and the options which are used when mounting. Some file system types are better protected against data corruption by storing recent updates in a journal.

Specifically the option atime should be switched off because it causes a write to the inode tables, every time a file or directory on your system is read. It updates the access time which is displayed in the directory listing with the ls -lau command. Because the disappearing files you mentioned are read-often files, I suspect something going wrong during these unnecessary access time update cycles.