22 May 2012, 6:41

Version 1.4 

Has anyone else experienced an issue with files disappearing - not displaying in original page which is used as a template & copied to individual portfolios & multiple groups - none of which can display the files despite having no problems previously - template page was created in late 2010 and multiple students assessment portfolios (every one that has been enrolled in this unit - around 100 students) have been affected by this issue.

Site admin at our hosting provider have checked backup & files are missing from there too. Any advice or suggestions that can be offered would be greatly appreciated. Even if we locate the original files and recreate the template page I am pretty sure that will not solve the problem for our affected students as the links to the original files will be broken - correct?

The original template page was created in 2010. It has13 image files (13 x single image blocks displayed in multiple columns) in a restricted access group with only 4 group admins allocated permissions. Template page has been copied across to a unit based group with students as members - some members have copied the template to their individual portfolios. Students are required to view the images and make a selection of an appropriate image/s from the 13 available and then display in other individual pages as part of their assessment.

This has worked fabulously until now and is not a problem for a similar setup with another page created in the same manner and copied and used in the same way by students.  We had a reported incident yesterday where a student phoned teachers to say they could not see the image files when working off campus. The teacher thought it may have been a random issue with browser setup or student error - when the student came to class today the teacher checked again and the issue was still occuring - it was reported to me as Institution Admin -  after some initial investigation and troubleshooting I realised that all pages containing the files were being affected - upon checking the individual files I got an ACCESS DENIED error message in all groups and my own individual portfolio. So I then escalated the issue by reporting it to our Site Administrators who investigated further and checked the latest backup only to find the same issue was apparent. The page in the original and all copies along with all files in individual and group repositories and also where displayed in other pages shows a red cross in place of the image. 

Any advice or assistance would be greatly appreciated a it has now become apparent that a significant number of users are affected and we also have current students with assessments that need to be marked which is a little difficult for the teachers as some of the essential content is missing (not displayed) from all students pages. 

Thanks 

22 May 2012, 14:40

Hi Nayomie,

This must be stressfull. I hope things will work out.
Just a quick thought:
Have you tried changing the group to 'Open' without any restrictions?

Dirk

18 June 2012, 16:31

Thanks for the suggestion Dirk and yes it is rather frustrating

22 May 2012, 18:35

 A bit of extra info that might give developers more insight:

1. Only one folder in the group has been affected - everything else seems to be OK.
2. In the affected folder, 14 files were placed there in Dec 2010. Thirteen of these were put into a page that could be copied (the template). These 13 files have subsequently disappeared from the file system (don't know when). The one file that wasn't put into the page is still on the file system.
3. All 14 files were still listed in the affected folder of the group's files, but only one has an icon (the one that remains on the file system).
4. There has been no server migration or anything else that could have resulted in data loss.
5. There is indication of similar problems here for Heidi and Maju: https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=3884

25 May 2012, 13:01

Hi, have you altered your settings in the Cpanel under the Security Holtlinks Protection tab.  I did this and found that all the pics on my site were deleted and placeholders put in their place.  If you did, either turn it off again or give permissions as directed in the wizard.

18 June 2012, 16:28

Thanks for your response - I don't know the answer as I don't think we can change this stting as Institution admins I'm assuming that would be a site admin setting.

17 June 2012, 21:03

For what its worth: I had a user report that she lost documents that were in a page that was copied by others. The loss occured when the name of the copied page was the same as the original one (so the report goes). Users were taught to always change the name of anything copied to deal with this. I can't reproduce this on a 1.5 or 1.4.

As a precaution, I always produce anything intended to be copied in an individual user account and then make it available to a group for example. Not that I don't trust groups-I just think its more straight forward that way as there could be several group admins, different types of groups etc which can be altered by several people. 

18 June 2012, 16:31

Thanks Dirk

Yes I agree, we have always directed users to rename copied pages. We actually setup a template group with limited access for a couple of group admins who were working on the templates - all new templates are created and stored in this group and then copied to other groups and individual portfolios.

18 June 2012, 16:33

We have since experienced a second similar issue with images disappearing from the template and all copies that have since been made. At this point there seems to be no explanation as to what is causing the problem and site admins from our hosting provider can seem to find no casue or solution.