Friendly reminder to never forcebly shutdown your PC - eviltoast

I just lost 44 GB of data that I downloaded in the past two hours. My PC started to get laggy and it got stuck so I just shut it down believing that all will be well since the data has already been written to disk…

  • AProfessional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    212·
    1 year ago

    This is incorrect too. The OS buffers writes to drives for performance, a portion is kept in memory and flushed to disk when possible. A sudden power loss can easily result in a partial write.

    That said a drive failure is also possible.

    The filesystems journal will be the source of truth.

    • kaitco@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      44 GB over two hours, though? If it were the last couple GBs in the last maybe 10 ten minutes, but unless the OP is running a PC from 2002, the data should have already moved from RAM to disk in that time.

      But yeah, the filesystem journal will explain what happened there.

    • Yendor@reddthat.comEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      The buffer is flushed every 6 seconds. OP was pulling down 44GB/7200sec = 6MB/s. OP would have only lost 36MB to disk caching.

      If it was a single 44GB file and OP turned off less than 6 seconds after it finished, then it could have been caching. But that’s very unlikely.