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I'm not sure if anyone can provide insight or aim me to some additional logs to search for, but this is a growing concern...

I run ubuntu-server (17.10) on an ancient laptop with an external hard drive connected formatted XFS; that hard drive holds all my media and personal files to run on a personal server and through the Plex software.

Within the last few months, I've found files randomly not there any more. For example, this morning I went to play a playlist via Plex and the music files were no longer on the drive.

Previously, I considered an outside "attack" and copiously went through my server logs... nothing suspicious. I looked into Plex being the culprit, but found another dead end.

Any ideas--other than "your drive is dead" because I don't think that's the issue--on where to search for some answers?

Thank you, my fellow Ubuntu-ers.

moore.bryan
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  • Are there any log messages in the system logs concerning the device/disk? What are your mount options? Do you disconnect the hard disk occasionally? If you disconnect, is the device correctly unmounted? How often does this happen? When you shutdown the server you could observe the console; maybe there is some anomaly during shutdown. – Stefan Jan 11 '18 at 21:29
  • Just the usual i/o operations. I do not have the drive automount, so I manually remount each time I restart the server and I've not once run into any mount errors. Once per month, I shut down the entire system for about 10 minutes and reboot; I've never had any issues.

    I checked the console at shutdown and didn't see anything strange...

     – moore.bryan Jan 24 '18 at 13:43
  • Next: how are your general system ressources? Does your system experience higher wait I/O times at times? Does your system page out excessively (in general or occasionally)? Have a close look at your sardata esp. sar -uBrS (go back in history with sar -f). Have you searched for any known bugs concerning your specific CPU / motherboard / laptop? As modern filesystems relay heavily on memory any problem in regard to memory (have you checked your RAM?) could potentially lead to corrupted data. - By the way; I hope you have a backup of your data?! – Stefan Jan 24 '18 at 21:31
  • Not sure why I can't edit that post...

    Thanks for your help, @Stefan! Entering sar -uBrS gives me nothing; i.e., Cannot open /var/log/sysstat/sa25: No such file or directory Please check if data collecting is enabled. ¿Qué?

    Everything else seems good-to-go and the RAM is "new"--that is, installed within the last year.

    The most important stuff is backed up... the music, not so much. :-(

     – moore.bryan Jan 25 '18 at 09:39
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    The Systems Activity Reporter (sar) is not active by default; so sorry there. Any luck on the known bug hunt? Can you attach the external drive to some other pc / laptop and if so, keeping it runing over a longer period do you experience the same problems? The system start menu (Grub2) should have a memtest item to check your memory (does not apply in case you have a UEFI system - cmp.: https://askubuntu.com/questions/162564/); otherwise you might have a memory check in BIOS. – Stefan Jan 26 '18 at 22:22
  • Swear to God, I hadn't thought about just keeping it plugged in to another device to see... thanks for thinking of that!

    Memtest came back good.

     – moore.bryan Jan 27 '18 at 18:31

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