Ubuntu 12.10: music disappearing

[nickdalzell]

I have noticed that often songs i have downloaded via my laptop or phone and then transferred to my computer have managed to disappear. at first i thought it was just music on my laptop that i recently tossed out for being a real pain, but today i fired it up and five songs total were gone that were not the night before. fsck is not reporting anything wrong either. is there some kind of odd DRM at work that deletes songs if they are determined to be illegal or something? it seems to only affect files within my music folder itself, but those in 'downloads' are fine. although it does add unnecessary clutter to my download folder to have music mixed in with other stuff.....or are the permissions simply holding the songs in RAM until i shut down?

 

[MoodyBlues]

I have noticed that often songs i have downloaded via my laptop or phone and then transferred to my computer have managed to disappear.

In > 25 years of using *nix, I've never seen files disappear!

at first i thought it was just music on my laptop that i recently tossed out for being a real pain, but today i fired it up and five songs total were gone that were not the night before. fsck is not reporting anything wrong either.

Without being able to take a really good look at your system, including its startup/shutdown scripts, any cron jobs that may be running, and so on, it'll be difficult to help.

is there some kind of odd DRM at work that deletes songs if they are determined to be illegal or something?

Not to my knowledge.

it seems to only affect files within my music folder itself, but those in 'downloads' are fine.

Interesting.

although it does add unnecessary clutter to my download folder to have music mixed in with other stuff.....or are the permissions simply holding the songs in RAM until i shut down?

Why are you shutting down? At any rate, files shouldn't disappear--and probably are not--on their own. If they're disappearing from your music directory, there has to be a reason, such as you're running something that's doing it, or...??? I don't know. We need more details, but I'm not even sure where to start.

BTW, I'd suggest placing questions like this in the Linux thread. Whether it is or isn't Ubuntu 12.10 related, it's still basically a Linux issue so it makes sense to ask over there.

 

[lunatic59]

The only thing that comes to mind is that your music folder isn't a copy but a symlink and when you disconnect the device, the links would disappear.

 

[argedion]

How are you copying them? A Drag and Drop may be only linking the files like Luna said. Try a few with copy and paste and see what happens. I never have an issue with my music "disapering"

 

[lunatic59]

How are you copying them? A Drag and Drop may be only linking the files like Luna said. Try a few with copy and paste and see what happens. I never have an issue with my music "disapering"

Or open a terminal and try the cl.

 

[nickdalzell]

i have always copied and pasted. or in this case cut and pasted. if they are simply being copied over from my phone i tend to keep them on the phone so it's a mere copy. if from my download folder of my computer to the music folder it's a cut and paste. as for why i am shutting down my computer is a laptop. it does not give 'hibernate' as a shutdown option and tends to eat batteries alive if i keep it in standby in the case for a day or so. while in-use it is always left on most of the time.

it's not a large loss, i will simply login one morning and one or more songs will be GONE. last night i lost a Depeche Mode favorite, the night before three downloads from YouTube were missing.

when i do shutdown or restart i have noticed one job is flagged FAIL. something involving 'cron' which i doubt has any relevance to this issue. also, none of my filesystems are being properly unmounted at shutdown which will force fsck to scan unless i cancel. not sure if that is the culprit or not.

 

[MoodyBlues]

i have always copied and pasted. or in this case cut and pasted. if they are simply being copied over from my phone i tend to keep them on the phone so it's a mere copy. if from my download folder of my computer to the music folder it's a cut and paste.

Files in *nix should never inexplicably disappear. So you've got something going on that's either, A) making this occur, or, B) making it look like this is occurring.

it's not a large loss, i will simply login one morning and one or more songs will be GONE. last night i lost a Depeche Mode favorite, the night before three downloads from YouTube were missing.

Try this: When your files are there, go to a command line and do an ls -ail; either take a screenshot or grab the output, and post one of those here.

when i do shutdown or restart i have noticed one job is flagged FAIL. something involving 'cron'

Ah-ha.

which i doubt has any relevance to this issue.

Without more info, we can't know for sure.

also, none of my filesystems are being properly unmounted at shutdown which will force fsck to scan unless i cancel. not sure if that is the culprit or not.

That shouldn't cause unintentional deletion of files, but separate from that it's not good so you ought to find and fix the problem.

 

[mikedt]

it's not a large loss, i will simply login one morning and one or more songs will be GONE. last night i lost a Depeche Mode favorite, the night before three downloads from YouTube were missing.

Maybe your computer doesn't like Depeche Mode? :smokingsomb:

 

[9to5cynic]

@nick, what program are you using to play the audio with? I also haven't heard of files vanishing, but maybe they are being moved? I'm thinking depending on the application, it might be 'consolidating' your music library. I know that itunes has a feature that does this, it'll grab all your files and put them in a logically folder structure.

Other than that, I'm not really sure.

 

[nickdalzell]

my playback app is Clementine. though the songs disappear from the list in the app, i did double-check the folder to be sure. they were gone. could not add them back and had to re-download them again. all 10 or so of them. most of my music remained intact. just lost the more recently downloaded stuff. when playing them i just added the contents of the entire music folder to the playlist. they remained in the folder

@Moody, when do i use that command? before or after i notice songs going missing again?

@MikeDT, it only lost one out of a dozen Depeche Mode hits. the rest were from YouTube converted to MP3, which were mostly movie soundtracks, much of them scores from Star Trek: The Next Generation, along with one hit from Blancmange and another two from 1980s country singers

 

[MoodyBlues]

@Moody, when do i use that command? before or after i notice songs going missing again?

Do it before they disappear. If nothing's disappeared the next day, then do it again. And so on. Until something disappears, then post the output here and tell us which file(s) disappeared. In other words, the listing you post WILL include the now-missing files because they were there when you took that snapshot, so you'll need to tell us which of those files disappeared. Then we can look at those files' attributes [from your listing] and see if there's any clue there!

 

[mikedt]

Dedicated to Nick...

...sorry couldn't resist.

 

[nickdalzell]

i tried to screencap but it only took what could be displayed on the screen. it's a HUGE list. it won't copy/paste. well over 350 songs

 

[MoodyBlues]

i tried to screencap but it only took what could be displayed on the screen. it's a HUGE list. it won't copy/paste. well over 350 songs

Then send its output to a file instead:

ls -ail > whatever_you_want_to_name_your_file

The file will contain the listing, as plain text, so you should be able to copy/paste its contents without issue. However, instead of posting 350+ lines here, you can edit it down to make it more manageable. Leave some entries from files that DIDN'T disappear, and definitely include all entries for any files that DID disappear. Make sure you indicate to us which is which.

 

[mikedt]

i have always copied and pasted. or in this case cut and pasted. if they are simply being copied over from my phone i tend to keep them on the phone so it's a mere copy. if from my download folder of my computer to the music folder it's a cut and paste. as for why i am shutting down my computer is a laptop. it does not give 'hibernate' as a shutdown option and tends to eat batteries alive if i keep it in standby in the case for a day or so. while in-use it is always left on most of the time.

If you're not seeing "Hibernate" in the shut down options. You might still be able to hibernate(suspend to disk) your Linux laptop. There's a script in the repos called "hibernate". However you've got to have a swap partition with enough space for the RAM image, and a BIOS that's ACPI compliant.

 

[nickdalzell]

Oh that's why it won't hibernate. No swap space. I thought it saved to the main partition