28 July 2011, 21:19

Hi all,

I have been talking to a student today and she has advised me she has lost files under a view a few times. When she loses them the title is still there but there is no file listed. There is nothing to click on to see any error message either. She also advised that her tutor her been removed from having view access and a comment her tutor had made had also vanished. She is concerned this may happened again. Any ideas or suggestions on why this maybe happening? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

01 August 2011, 5:15

Hello Heidi,

Does your student still see the file in her files area? I have not heard of files vanishing without somebody deleting them. Could it have been that the tutor logged in as the student? Does s/he have that permission?

Nevertheless, as you are using Mahara 1.2 if I remember correctly, you should be upgrading as 1.2 is not supported anymore.

Cheers

Kristina

01 August 2011, 5:23

This sounds like a cron issue that I heard RichardM talking about a while ago... I think that it was something to do with the cron job timeing out when trying to update a cache of the permissions.

Heidi, what version of mahara are you using? I believe that this may be a bug which has been fixed though I can't find the bug now to confirm my suspicions...

Andrew

01 August 2011, 18:07

Andrew, I don't think that cron problem ever resulted in files being deleted altogether, it just gave "access denied" errors for other users when trying to look at a file that's not directly included in a view, but included in a folder that's included in a view.

In this case it sounds like the name of the file is no longer even listed under the block title, so it could just be that the file was uploaded into a view, but then subsequently deleted in the user's files area.

Heidi, when you say "the title is still there but there is no file listed" do you mean the title of the block is still there, but the name of the file is gone?

01 August 2011, 21:36

Thanks all for your replies.

Richard, yes I do mean the title of the block is still there, but the name of the file is gone. The student is an advanced user of Mahara and she has said she has experienced the same problem a few times.

01 August 2011, 23:15

We have got the same issue with one student - titles of files are there under sub folder with all details. When that student tried to download them "Access denied" message comes up.Student uploaded something around 30 files and he can download only 3 files. All files were uploaded last year July 2010  same day at differant time (very near). They were checked back in  5/7/9 days after initial upload thereafter never checked until July 2011.

After investigation we found these files (around 27) are missing physically from mahara dataroot. ! Strange !

We tried to track down how it happenned - we checked error logs / cron logs and nothing was happenned at that day. Even server was up since long without any problem.

We also thought about clamav but it will not allow to upload if infected and will report administration.

Our Mahara version is 1.2.9. We are in the process of upgrading it to 1.3.6. Even if Mahara 1.2 is not supported it would be interesting to know about this. We have tried our best to track down this and no success.

Is there anything in cron that deletes files/comments/whatever ?

02 August 2011, 3:07

My mistake -- I thought it was something that removed permission to view the files, and hence they disappeared from the view.

02 August 2011, 18:24

In our case we lost files physically ! And also assume Heidi Humphrey experienced same thng.