Have you had mysterious vanishing Files..

I have noticed that on occasion different videos seem to disapear from my drives. I have seen it happen lots of times and am wondering if anyone else has the problem.

It seemed to do it on usb and sata drives and even on a drive across the network. I have seen some virus programs delete text files and such they thought had hazardous things in them, I've forgotten what anti virus that is.
Is there any truth that media player 11 can delete files?
What about Microsoft silver-light that is there flash spy-ware they try to get everyone to install?
What about that dream-scene desktop of theirs i seen some note on it monitoring media.

I have run scan disk but I unchecked the fix errors box I wonder if that does it.

I hope to get vista logging turned on some how so it keeps track of when files are deleted , moved or renamed.

I'd be surprised if Media Player was deleting files without you asking it to.

Silverlight is just a media/presentation system, not any sort of spyware (where'd you get that idea?). It does a similar thing to flash.

Running scandisk without fix errors on will actually run in a "look but don't touch" mode. i.e. find and report errors, but do nothing about them. If "fix" was on, it might delete an occasional corrupted file entry. It wouldn't be able to be run on a network server and affect remote files, though.

You could lose files on usb/e-sata/hot-swap media if you detached the drive too soon after writing (and windows has write caching on, i.e. not set "optimize for quick removal"). Windows will warn you if you do this though, via a popup balloon from the notification area (I think is the message is "delayed write failed").

I keep my usb drives set to non cached so they do not blow the directory's if they loose power. Actually I keep all my drives that way except my cache drive and swap file drive.


I set my system to not use any of the old dos file names. I also disabled the feature to update the date of each file on read access. Both of these helped my speed a lot and seem to cause less fragmentation.


This new vista search is so quirky it seems to work right about 1/8 the time. I blame it for several lost files. I have learned to watch it closely.


I mentioned that Tv Rename was messing up on files with lower case first letters. I wonder if this is because i don't use the sort file names and some how it is affecting how you program sees them.

Vista search's uselessness is the main reason I've gone back to XP. It won't find files that I know are there, and saw in the folder the instant before I entered my search. If it finds stuff, trust it. If it doesn't find something, that doesn't mean anything.

Disabling DOS names and access times shouldn't cause things to go missing, as long as your always writing to the drive from Windows or other systems that properly understand long filenames.

The next time a file goes missing, try using something like agent ransack to look for it, and see if it is really missing.

I think I may have found what happened to some of the files. I have set the vista search to look for file names only and had unchecked the "don't use index when searching the file system" So it was using the index to find things and would grab files in other directories that it should not be getting.

I now set it to
> Search file names only.
> include sub folders
> find partial matches
> don't use index file system

This seems to keep it from grabbing files it should not. I still have trouble with things like a directory that has a extension such as sample.avi When cutting and pasting an avi where folder it is at. if the avi has the same name.

I have been keeping the drives defraged and no errors seem to show. If I was much good at programing i would make a drive monitor. I think vista has some reporting tools if I can figure how to have it log when files are removed.

Missing files suck.

If you are running Vista or Windows Server you can enable file auditing on your videos directory and have it record deletes in the Event Viewer

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/maga ... 65937.aspx

I had to do that to find what was killing some of my files (it was my Media Center (anyone remember the original Meedio?))

Some things to note is that moves off the drive count as deletes as well as anything that does smart move (copy then delete)

-Stewood

TVRename uses Windows' built in move for renaming files, or moving files to a new folder on the same drive. It uses its own built-in copy-then-delete for a move across drives.