Hi, This post isn't going to be too detailed as I ended up in a recovery situation and was focused on checking the integrity of my files rather than recording every step as I went. I thought it was worth reporting as the file system seemed to recover in an odd way. I am not expecting any assistance as I was able to recover all my data. I am using an XFS partition for storing my digital camera photos. I have 2 cards, card-1 and card-2. On any day when I injest the contents of the cards I make directories import-YYYY-MM-DD/card-{1,2}/ I have a script that creates the directories and performs the injesting. I had previously (2012/07/04) injested import-2012-07-04/card-1/ On 2012-07-28 I went into import-2012-07-04/ and created a thumbnail gallery with my thumbnail script. This involved creating a directory import-2012-07-05/gal-card-1 and populating it with files. The directory entry for import-2012-07-04 was now dirty. Simultaneously, I began a fresh injest session into import-2012-07-28/card-2/. Whilst these two jobs were running I suffered a hard power failure as I unplugged the thing (it's a laptop) not realising that my battery was flat. :-( When I rebooted I noticed that import-2012-07-04 was showing up somewhat thusly in 'ls -la': ----- ?????????? ? ? ? ?? ??? ? ??:?? import-2012-07-04 ----- I could not 'cd' into it nor could I 'cat' it. I thought the directory was lost and resolved to restore it from backups when I returned home. I didn't pay much attention at the time to the contents of import-2012-07-28/ Over the course of the day I injested a few more things into import-2012-07-28/ When I returned home I looked into restoring the backups. To my surprise, import-2012-07-04/ was showing up as a valid directory again. Even more surprisingly it contained a (somewhat corrupt) card-2/ directory that should have been in import-2012-07-28/. It did not contain the card-1/ directory. There is anecdotal evidence that import-2012-07-28/card-2/ was no longer present. I recovered import-2012-07-04/card-1/ from an xfsdump. I recovered import-2012-07-28/card-2/ because I hadn't gotten around to verifying the injest so didn't format the card before I reused it. It wasn't full so I added more shots to it and injested it again later in the day. Today, I deleted import-2012-07-04/card-2/ after much to-ing and fro-ing. It was a subset of import-2012-07-28/card-2b/ (an injest of the same card later in the day, albeit with extra files) and some of the overlapping files were corrupt or empty in 2012-07-04/card-2/. (My injest script records checksums and I used a visual verification of the images I was concerned about.) The corrupt & missing files were the ones towards the end of the injest: they had high numbered filenames, so would have been the ones in flight at the time of the power failure. I'm running XFS on Debian Testing (Wheezy) ----- $ dpkg -l |grep xfs | grep -v x11 ii xfsdump 3.0.6 Administrative utilities for the XFS filesystem ii xfslibs-dev 3.1.7+b1 XFS filesystem-specific static libraries and headers ii xfsprogs 3.1.7+b1 Utilities for managing the XFS filesystem ----- ----- $ uname -a Linux lago 3.2.0-3-amd64 #1 SMP Thu Jun 28 09:07:26 UTC 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux ----- I have "defaults" under "options" in /etc/fstab. I'm using Debian defaults on a Lenovo Thinkpad X200 laptop. I didn't expect to see the import-2012-07-04/ directory again and I certainly didn't expect to see it populated with the card-2/ subdirectory. Regards, @ndy -- andyjpb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.ashurst.eu.org/ 0x7EBA75FF _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs