Contents of an entire folder lost forever

[trumad]

Hi there,

BT sync is a nice piece of software, but it's inexplicably deleted the contents of an entire folder. I have no idea why. I guess I should take you through what I did, because I have no clue how to reproduce what happened. I certainly didn't delete the folder, on either drive.

1. use puresync to sync the hard drives initially on the same PC. It keeps timestamps on all files, but not on folders. weird.

2. install BT sync. connect backup hard drive to an offsite PC.

3. share the secret, pair the folders, allowing both to read/write/delete whatever.

4. opt not to use the syncarchive folder, because I had about 30GB free on the drives. My thinking was: what if I deleted 100GB from my primary HDD, and then copied another 100GB to it? The sync might fail, and that would create hassle. So I made the mistake of opting just to just put files in recycle bin.

5. Sync drive. Works fine for a few days, apart from some files that are "skipped due to bad timestamp". Those files seem unrelated - they haven't been deleted.

6. Deleted a 80GB folder from primary hard drive. Unrelated to the files that are missing.

6. Woke up this morning and notice I have an awful lot of free space on my HDD. around 300 less than I thought. Can't figure out why - I had only deleted around 80GB the previous day.

7. Try to play some music and realise the files are gone. They're not in either recycle bin, on either PC. They are gone. around 300GB of music & music videos, that have taken me 8 years to collect.

I know you probably can't help me. But I would hope that this would help somebody else in the future to not lose their valuable data. Use syncarchive. Then again, perhaps bittorrent sync would still remove the files without using syncarchive, if this bug really is as serious as it seems to be?

I'll be happy to answer clarifying questions.

[trumad]

Sorry, I posted this in the wrong place. Will I repost, or would you rather move it? Sorry!