[Owncloud] Fwd: How I just lost 2/3 of my files to the sync-client

[Benjamin Schieder]

Hello there.

The subject is intentionally scary but it's equally important, at least 
I think so.
I just lost about 2/3 of my files to the sync client version 1.5.0 
running on Debian connected to an owncloud instance version 5.0.13 also 
running on Debian. I'm writing this here down to warn others of this 
particular caveat.

I have a fairly big owncloud files directory. Around 20 GB spread over 
thousands of files.
I used to have a clientsync/ directory that was synced between three 
computers.
After a reinstallation of my laptop and re-configuration of the sync 
client, the client now synced the / directory of my server instead of 
the /clientsync directory.
Well, that was fine with me, so I decided to move the directories from 
/clientsync/* to / .
The sync client then started working on that and the logfile showed lots 
of "Moved" messages. All fine so far.
At some point, the sync client encountered a 500 Internal server error 
and stopped working.
During investigation, the sync client crashed and I restarted it.
Now it started to sync again but started deleting files on the server 
and locally.
In the end, only the files successfully "Moved" were kept, all others 
that existed on the server but not on the client or vice-versa were 
deleted.

Personally, I'd call that a serious bug but am unsure how I can and if I 
want to reproduce it.

I was able to restore the files from another machines sync directory, 
but it was very scary nonetheless.

Be careful out there!


Kind regards,
Benjamin

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