Keep remote directory up to date DELETED MY WEBSITE

I host a project on sourceforge. I decided, for the sake of backups and keeping my data, to use the "Keep remote directory up to date" to keep site and my backup on my pc up to date.

WHEN I TRIED THIS, IT TIMED OUT AND DELETED ALL THE FILES ON THE SERVER AND MY PC!!!

I am extremely angry and bewildered right now. I have no other backups of my data. Keeping a copy on the server and my PC should have been enough. PLEASE tell me there is a way to undo this, or that winscp cached my files somewhere on my hard drive.

I'm sorry for what happened to you. There's no backup.

But anyway this is nonsense. The function you refer to NEVER DELETES anything on your local drive! If you still believe that it did, give me more details of what you were doing, if you rememeber that.

Ok, here's what happened.

I was initially looking for a way to keep my remote connection alive, because sourceforge was dropping the connection every minute.

Looking through these forums, I ran across people talking about this function. Though it was unrelated to what I was looking for, it seemed like a great idea to help mirror the remote site to my local folder.

I ran the function, and pointed it to my local folder, it then started running. I minimized the window and continued working on some other things while I was waiting. After about 5-10 minutes, I went back and noticed the window was still there, but everything was greyed out except for the Transfer Settings button. I had to close the window via the close button on the top right.

That then displayed the remote server window, which was now completely empty. I then checked my local folder, and that was completely empty as well. I did a search on all of my drives to see if there were any duplicates of any of the files, in case they had been cached and there was nothing there.

I refreshed the connection to the server a couple times and moved through different directories to make sure I was actually still connected, which I was. At this point my heart stopped for about 3 beats and I began indenting my forehead with my desk.

I'm running winXP SP1 with all of the current updates except for SP2 and updates specific to that service pack. (I refuse to upgrade to SP2, for fear of the damn things that upgrade does to existing installations.)

I'm using winSCP 3.7.5 build 294.

I had 1 instance of notepad and 1 instance of firefox v1.0.4 open with several tabs.

Thats about all the info I can think of that might be relevant. I'm currently spending more hours I had not intended rebuilding the graphics layout from a photoshop backup. Unfortunately, all of the php coding I've done for the site is now gone. Thankfully I still have my mysql data saved.

Geuis wrote:

Looking through these forums, I ran across people talking about this function. Though it was unrelated to what I was looking for, it seemed like a great idea to help mirror the remote site to my local folder.

I ran the function, and pointed it to my local folder, it then started running. I minimized the window and continued working on some other things while I was waiting. After about 5-10 minutes, I went back and noticed the window was still there, but everything was greyed out except for the Transfer Settings button. I had to close the window via the close button on the top right.

Are you sure you have used function Keep remote directory up to date? Because what you describe look rather like synchronisation. First you cannot use "Keep remote directory up to date" to "mirror the remote site to your local folder", what should be clear from the function name. Second, when you start it, it basically does nothing, while from your post it seems that it did something. Function Synchronize can easily delete your files if incorrectly configured.

Also before you mentioned that the function "timed out". What have you meant by this?

The fact that synchronization by all default settings deletes everything in a populated directory because the other directory is empty and was created at a later date is absolutely retarded. By definition synchronization should synchronize FILES by timestamp, not directories. Thank-you for loss of 10 years of my departments archives.

j_voels wrote:

The fact that synchronization by all default settings deletes everything in a populated directory because the other directory is empty and was created at a later date is absolutely retarded. By definition synchronization should synchronize FILES by timestamp, not directories. Thank-you for loss of 10 years of my departments archives.

It's not Martin's fault when you are too lame or stupid to regularly backup your data.

j_voels wrote:

The fact that synchronization by all default settings deletes everything in a populated directory because the other directory is empty and was created at a later date is absolutely retarded.

It does not, deleting is disabled by default.

By definition synchronization should synchronize FILES by timestamp, not directories. Thank-you for loss of 10 years of my departments archives.

Where have you seen such definition?

I just about had a heart attack tonight when I encountered the same problem - synchronizing my local and remote folders wiped everything on my local folder, leaving me with both folders empty.

Fortunately all my files were in the trash, so I was able to restore them, but I spent quite a few minutes staring in disbelief at my newly empty local folder before starting the hunt for all my lost files.

I've used a variety of FTP programs over the past 8 years, including making extensive use of synchronizing to move web sites from dev to test or test to production, and I've never encountered this issue before. I can understand that if you deleted a file from dev, then synchronizing should delete it from test when synchronized, but in this instance, it was a brand new site, moving up into test for the first time (into a newly created empty folder), and synchronizing wiped out my dev folder for the site in question.

I see that prikyl commented "Function Synchronize can easily delete your files if incorrectly configured." If the default settings constitute an incorrect configuration that will "easily delete your files", then that is a worry!

I've only recently started using WinSCP, and I don't think I will be using the synchronize function in it again in a hurry!

hmmmm wrote:

I just about had a heart attack tonight when I encountered the same problem - synchronizing my local and remote folders wiped everything on my local folder, leaving me with both folders empty.

Are you able to reproduce the problem?

I see that prikyl commented "Function Synchronize can easily delete your files if incorrectly configured." If the default settings constitute an incorrect configuration that will "easily delete your files", then that is a worry!

Synchronization can delete individual files, if you do not realise impact of your settings. But not whole tree (of course unless you synchronize against empty directory). And "by default" it does not delete anything.

1 week of work fucked by a WIPE

all local files are truncate to 0bytes

Ragen Dazs wrote:

1 week of work fucked by a WIPE

all local files are truncate to 0bytes

Are you able to reproduce the problem?