PNWDweller Posted July 28, 2009 Share Posted July 28, 2009 At first I thought it was bad software or a fluke, but all of a sudden, I am losing my files on my system randomly. Knowing that there are some (*ahem*) rogue viruses out there, and knowing that I stay away from the pirate scene, I did do a scan anyway of my system using iAntivirus and it turned out negative. My system is behind a netgear router which has WPA2 access enabled with a highly random generated key courtesy of secure keymakers online. I have never had any unauthorized access to my router according to the logs and also records I keep. I went into my email program today and discovered that a HUGE portion of my mail was deleted/removed from the folders. (using Postbox), These were off of my personal web server hosted elsewhere, so they are now working on a backup restore for my emails. Just now, I went into my external USB Hard drive and tried to access some files and ALAS! No record of these files anywhere to be found! To be precise, my virtualbox virtual machines (I use it to test how my web sites work in different browsers) (I know, go to browsershots.org, easier but not as fast.:) ). I can rebuild the machines, no problem but concerning the activations of Windows, I hate to run the counter up doing an install of this nature. It makes me a bit nervous now. I do have a nightly clone backup that I do overwriting my data to keep it fresh of my Mac's internal Hard drive to my Western Digital 500gb drive. That so far seems intact, however, I believe my data has been compromised earlier and I just now noticed it. The system was in the shop for a few days with a brand new OSX install put into place. Since I had a mirror of my system from the night before I took it to the shop, I didn't care about fresh install and booted off of the mirror and cloned itself to the internal mac hard drive. No problems with that up until now. Does anyone have any ideas as to why this may be happening randomly? If I can't track this down, I am probably going to do a complete system wipe and go from there, but only as a last resort. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shihchiun Posted July 28, 2009 Share Posted July 28, 2009 Do you live with other people? It sounds like somebody got onto your system and starting deleting stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PNWDweller Posted July 29, 2009 Author Share Posted July 29, 2009 Other people yes...My fiance' who never touches the computer or knows how to do these types of operations on the mac, (Just Windows), and her daughter who is 6 and NEVER goes near the computer. It is odd that one drive got erased completely, almost as if the directory table got deleted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
perochan Posted July 29, 2009 Share Posted July 29, 2009 maybe you should call the shop and ask if they did anything weird. maybe they fked you up and installed some hidden programs... you never know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ajua Posted July 29, 2009 Share Posted July 29, 2009 I would call the shop and ask to talk with the technician that was with your computer. Meanwhile, try to find a file/folder monitor for Mac OS to see what's happening to your files...I don't know about one for Mac, though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
giga Veteran Posted July 29, 2009 Veteran Share Posted July 29, 2009 Console.app Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PNWDweller Posted July 29, 2009 Author Share Posted July 29, 2009 I would call the shop and ask to talk with the technician that was with your computer.Meanwhile, try to find a file/folder monitor for Mac OS to see what's happening to your files...I don't know about one for Mac, though. I would do that, however once I got it home from the shop, I wiped the hard drive, booted off of the cloned drive containing my backup which had the most recent files up until that date so in essence not losing a beat and went from there, so any files installed by them would have been wiped with them would have been wiped with the restore. Console.app Looked in there, but saw a lot of references like the following: 7/26/09 10:04:39 PM Quicksilver[334] An error ocurred while scanning "User Accounts": launch path not accessible 7/26/09 10:15:33 PM [0x0-0x1db1db].org.mozilla.firefox[79081] Debugger() was called! 7/26/09 10:24:30 PM com.apple.coreservicesd[68] NOTE: Using non-mach-based version of client -> server communication, via direct function calls. 7/28/09 8:17:39 PM com.apple.coreservicesd[125] NOTE: Using non-mach-based version of client -> server communication, via direct function calls. (I copied most of those in order, not all inclusive for sure and have saved a full log to a spare drive for now so we can look at it later.) I am going to go ahead and do a reformat/install at this point. I am too tired of messing with this system right now. I have several pending projects for clients that can't be lost while I try to trace it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tech Geek Alex Posted July 29, 2009 Share Posted July 29, 2009 Uneducated Guess.....you have a hard drive that is starting to fail, so it isnt that your files are deleting, its the sectors of the drive that it cant read. Give that a check.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PNWDweller Posted July 29, 2009 Author Share Posted July 29, 2009 The hard drive in the Mac is brand new from factory as it was installed due to a failing hard drive earlier. So, that wouldn't be the culprit. However, the other drive that went empty was an older drive so maybe that might be the cause for losing my virtual machines. The drive that is in the Mac internally is the new one and it was where I lost a complete mail folder in Postbox email client. I am working with them (postbox) to see if I can get a repair of the mailbox data file. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rudy Posted July 29, 2009 Share Posted July 29, 2009 The hard drive in the Mac is brand new from factory as it was installed due to a failing hard drive earlier. So, that wouldn't be the culprit. However, the other drive that went empty was an older drive so maybe that might be the cause for losing my virtual machines. The drive that is in the Mac internally is the new one and it was where I lost a complete mail folder in Postbox email client. I am working with them (postbox) to see if I can get a repair of the mailbox data file. What makes you think a new hard drive couldn't be bad? I'm not saying it's the hard drive but your reasoning makes no sense Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PNWDweller Posted July 29, 2009 Author Share Posted July 29, 2009 Simply put it wouldn't be bad as they must pass quality control inspections at the factory. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
.Neo Posted July 29, 2009 Share Posted July 29, 2009 Simply put it wouldn't be bad as they must pass quality control inspections at the factory. :) In a perfect world that would absolutely be the case, unfortunately we don't life in such a place. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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