I was at uni a few days ago when I attempted to cut and paste a 500Mb file (a 3gp video recording) into my H drive on one of the uni network's Linux (Debian KDE 3.5) computers.
I did not see any error messages indicating the cut-and-paste job had failed, but when I looked at the resulting pasted file, it appears now as a 60Mb file (that's a 440Mb discrepancy!). My file was somehow shrunk! Did the file get broken up in the process of pasting it and this is the fragment of an incompletely copied file?
I suspect what happened was the file transfer was interrupted due to H drive size-allocation limitations imposed on users by administrators.
But you'd think Linux would anticipate that the file was bigger than would be possible to move to the intended destination and abort the transfer before it begun, not wait till it reached some forbidden limit then cancel discretely without notifying me.
Also in the event of an interrupted file transfer, one normally expects the original file to be remain intact (i.e. not deleted) the original USB drive?
The file appears in the destination, but is now much smaller and is non-functional. The original file in the source location on the external drive has disappeared, suggesting the job was completed successfully.
This resizing is rather bizarre and now I don't seem to have access to the original file. After cutting and pasting the original may have been removed from it's source location. The computer has mishandled this task, apparently causing me to lose my file, and I would like you to help me to retrieve my file.
I have tried recovering the file on my phone's SD card using PhotoRec and Sleuthkit forensic tool. No luck. Deleted sections of the disk may have been overwritten by new data. So zero progress on the source end. Any way to recover on the destination end (i.e. my uni network)?
peter@peter-deb:/media/E0FD-1813$ cd DCIM/
peter@peter-deb:/media/E0FD-1813/DCIM$ cd ..
peter@peter-deb:/media/E0FD-1813$ cd LOST.DIR/
peter@peter-deb:/media/E0FD-1813/LOST.DIR$ ls
peter@peter-deb:/media/E0FD-1813/LOST.DIR$ ls -a
. ..
peter@peter-deb:/media/E0FD-1813/LOST.DIR$
Best Answer
First, never move a file across the network, only copy. You can always delete the original after the copy has been successfully completed. Secondly, your local system might not even be aware that a filesystem quota exists on remote storage - don't assume that it's even possible to guess ahead of time whether a copy operation would fail due to a remote quota. As far as the "sending" process is concerned, all bytes were sent to and received by the remote end, and you wanted to move the file so now the original can be deleted - poof file gone.
"Any way to recover on the destination end?" - not a chance. OK, maybe a small one. Check with the network admin to see if just maybe the system actually received the full file but only reports back to you the size within your quota. Don't hold your breath.
And I apologize if I'm sounding a bit harsh, but it seems like some new habits are in order. :-)