All of my files are gone

My sites were down for about 3 hours this morning, and when I was finally able to log in through SSH, I was shocked to see that my home directory was empty. All of my files are gone. EVERYTHING is gone. Trouble tickets are going unanswered. This is a foo, and I have no way of getting a response. What am I supposed to do?

Since you have not posted your URL, we have no way of checking anything. Have you tried looking in your .snapshot directory for backups?

Sounds like an NFS issue to me. Support is most likely aware of it and working on it. I see nothing posted on the DHStatus page about it, so just wait until support gets back to you.
If it's an NFS issue, as I believe, then all of your content is still there and intact, it's just the that filer hasn't been mounted yet (for whatever reason only support knows).

Perhaps it would be wise to file a support ticket, especially since this may be a system wide outage.

Ok, I didn't write "this is a foo", and I don't know why it changed the word n-i-g-h-t-m-a-r-e to foo.

What is an NFS issue?

Where is my .snapshot directory? My home directory is empty.

I have opened trouble tickets two hours ago and they are going unanswered.

In reply to:

Where is my .snapshot directory? My home directory is empty.

It is not visible. However, if you do

cd .snapshot

you can get in there. It's a special directory containing backups of your stuff in various timeframes.

It's because the forum is a steaming pile of fooing foo. One of the fooing foos who runs the forum thought it would be fooing funny to replace foo with foo. Fight foo with foo, as it were. Foo has been barred, in fact.

No luck:

-bash: cd: .snapshot: No such file or directory

".snapshot" is an "invisible" directory in your "home" dir...you can cd from the shell prompt (or an ftp client) into it even though you cant see it:

cd .snapshot

2 hours seems like forever when your stuff is borked, but is not that unusual for email support; you can always submit a follow-up ticket, but I would try to be patient and give them a little more time. wink

--rlparker

I opened three trouble tickets. I don't understand why they can't just respond and tell me that they are working on it and everything will be back to normal. But instead they are silent while my 20 gigs of files are gone, and I am losing money, and wondering if my files are gone for good.

In reply to:
I opened three trouble tickets

Was that necessary? Would not a single ticket be enough? Do you think that 3 tickets == 3 times quicker service?

I understand...if they are having NFS problems, there may be a large queue of support request, and they may not have come across yours yet. If you have already submitted three tickets, I can't see how submitting another would help.

It may also be true that, if there *is* and NFS issue, they are more focused on getting it *fixed* then they are on responding to tickets...

Did you check the .snapshot directories for your files?

Finally, if a three hour downtime is making you "lose money", you might should consider whether or not a low-cost shared server host without an SLA is appropriate for your site. DreamHost is a great value, but "it is what it is" and, if your livelihood depends on 100% uptime, it may not be your best choice as you do not have telephone support available in situations like this, and responses from tech support may take some time.

--rlparker

The first ticket was for my sites being inaccessible. I opened a second ticket an hour later just in case the first one was overlooked, which is very possible since I am dealing with human beings, and from past experience they usually respond quickly. And I opened the third ticket when I was finally able to log in but found all of my files were gone.

You still haven't given us your URL.

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/
That's most likely the reason you can't see your files/etc.
And it's also probably why support hasn't gotten back to you yet.

For the record, the downtime has been 5 hours - and right in the middle of the day too. If they are too busy fixing the problem to respond to tickets, that is understandable, but they could have taken a minute to update the DH status page and alerted everyone to the situation all at once. If the DH status page was updated I would not have opened a ticket at all.

BTW, my files have reappeared although are still inaccessible via the web. I have dealt with web hosts for 7 years, and while there have been many problems I have never had any files disappear, so naturally I would be very concerned.

scjessey, I do not understand how posting the URL would have helped since it had nothing to do with the missing files.

I'm on the spunky cluster, and all of my services are working just fine. You might just be unlucky in this particular case, or it may be an unrelated problem. Posting your URL would allow someone else to check to see if your site is working from an alternative location, and eliminate one of the possible problems. If you don't do this, we (as simply other customers) are limited in what specific assistance we can give.

This is showing as fixed in status.

Regards,
Rudy

In reply to:
For the record, the downtime has been 5 hours - and right in the middle of the day too.

Right. And it might be even longer before it is completely resolved; none of that changes the relevance of what I said about the appropriateness of a non-SLA governed low-cost shared hosting service for a site where 24/7 uptime is paramount for your income.

It's always nice when the status blog reflects your problem, cause it tends to alleviate a lot of worry.

It might be the "middle of the day" for *you*, but this is the internet, and it is also "5 o'clock, somewhere." wink

In reply to:
I have dealt with web hosts for 7 years, and while there have been many problems I have never had any files disappear, so naturally I would be very concerned.

Yep. I would be worried too!

--rlparker

In reply to:
It's because the forum is a steaming pile of fooing foo. One of the fooing foos who runs the forum thought it would be fooing funny to replace foo with foo. Fight foo with foo, as it were. Foo has been barred, in fact.

You are right that the admins are very good at foos! We suggest the tournament version! http://www.vdlp.net/tornado/tournament2000.asp

Everything seems normal now. Thank you everyone for the responses.

BTW, just in case you were curious about NFS, here's a wiki article on the NFS protocol.

There are a number of odd problems that can occur if your filesystem is NFS mounted that you may think are otherwise "inconceivable", so it's useful to have some idea of what's going on...

Good deal! I'm glad to see you are "back in business" smile

--rlparker

Yes, it's always trying on one's patience and nerves when your site's down and there's nothing you can do about it...

Glad to see that everything is better and that your files are all in once piece!

Any suggestions on how to actually contact DH when you can't get access to your control panel? Going to https://panel.dreamhost.com/ gives me a "The page isn't redirecting properly" error.

The issue isn't that I am missing all our files, they are there. You can ssh in and they are there. But if you try to access any of them get a 404 error. Attempting to go to the domain name gives a the following error:

"Site Temporarily Unavailable
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this.

error id: "bad_httpd_conf" "

Would love to be able to submit a ticket as it is noted on the status web site, but, well I can't, since control panel isn't working. So, how do I actually get into contact with them? I have put a note on the status site, but that of course "may not be read by DH staff". Do they follow what is happening here on the forums?

My site has been down all day long too. I've filed tickets but I haven't heard a peep from DH in over SIX hours. This is very frustrating.

Support tries to get back to you within 24 hours. Submitting extra tickets in the mean time just slows them down.

While you're waiting, make sure to check DreamHostStatus.com and posting your URL here for others to verify the outage.

-Scott

Dreamhoststatus hasn't been updated since yesterday. I have customers from all over the country emailing me about the site being down. This morning all of my files were missing, like others here, but now my files are back but I get a 404 on my site.

http://www.newdimensions.org

you can use the form here: http://www.dreamhost.com/contact.cgi

DreamHostStatus has been updated twice today. They also state that if you're still having problems, then contact them, which you probably have.

Strange that the files are back, but you're getting a 404 (I also get the 404). Are you sure the files are back where they're supposed to be?

-Scott

re: files -- the directory where the files are stored looks fine to me. I can ftp to the site, which is good, considering I couldn't even do that this morning. I've filed a ticket, am I supposed to reply to the dreamhost status post also?

FYI, site back up.

Your site is now loading fine for me.

--rlparker