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linuxmint / mintupdate

The Linux Mint Update Manager
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So where is my data now? #805

Open DanielSmedegaardBuus opened 1 year ago

DanielSmedegaardBuus commented 1 year ago

Describe the bug apt installed mintupdate, ran it. Mint 20.3.

The application said something about having to create a snapshot first, so I let it. It opened up timeshift, and it started creating a snapshot with rsync (which I found odd, as I'm using btrfs, and I'd expect it to simply snapshot the btrfs volumes).

It ran for something like ten hours before my connected Windows machine lost its Samba mount on the Mint server.

I connected the display to the Mint box. It had a GUI warning about the space on / being depleted. Which is interesting, since I had a little over 100GB free with 20-some GB to back up.

I assumed this was to do with timeshift being buggy, so in an open SSH session, I searched for where timeshift might've spammed my / partition, and in /run/timeshift/3494058/backup/timeshift was 100+ GB of garbage.

I deleted it.

ZSH immediately stopped working. E.g.

zsh: command not found: ls 
_z_dirs:2: no such file or directory: /home/daniel/.z
_z:35: command not found: date
prompt_status:5: command not found: wc
_z:63: command not found: env
_z:63: command not found: env

That makes no sense in a world where something like timeshift isn't insane. Couldn't reboot. Tried rebooting with the GUI. Got a dialog with boxes instead of characters. Couldn't reboot. Had to turn off the power, and now I have a BusyBox prompt complaining that everything to boot the system is missing.

Where is my data?

DanielSmedegaardBuus commented 1 year ago

In the busybox environment, pretty much everything is gone. No /etc folder in /root, for instance. Mounting the /@home subvol gives me a daniel folder with just an empty Desktop folder in it and a few .z files in ~.

What the ever living fubar is going on?

DanielSmedegaardBuus commented 1 year ago

Just to follow up. Yup, my data is dead. Timeshift and/or mintupdate is absolutely insane. Somehow it chose

a) To rsync instead of snapshot on a btrfs volume b) To move (?) all my files into a random folder in /run/timeshift. I was actually under the impression that /run was tmpfs, and maybe it is, so the perfection to the insane destruction is that it would move files into memory, which would swap to disk, which would fill up and destroy any chance of recovering data. c) To state that 20-some GB needed to be backed up (which was correct, that's what was on /), but then continue to start copying data from my 48TB of attached storage until / was full, and services started failing.

I've tried recovering files using various btrfs-related methods and scripts, but pretty much everything is corrupted. My latest backup was from January, because my backup ZFS pool was failing and I was recovering it offline. I lost over a week's worth of programming progress, and a number of important files. Because mint.

Never again. I've never, ever, in my 20+ years of using Linux experienced something this insane and incompetent. This is what Windows 95 did. Maybe. Probably not.