Last week (Sep 10) I worked a whole day (on my Ubuntu 12.04 HP elitebook 8530p laptop) using a tex editor (TexWorks) and Jabref to maintain a Bibtex library. Today however I noticed all my modifications of that day are lost! The 'Date Modified' date on the files indicate the last changes two weeks ago (Sep 4). My first reaction was to look at the editors for not properly saving due to either program bugs or file permission problems but after finding no problems and when I launched my online backup program CrashPlan (which saves file modifications every 15 minutes) my latest modified files had been stored properly online!
I believe this means the files were available and saved properly on the file system, backup-ed, but however somehow the changes were lost afterwards. My worry is that my new Seagate hybrid drive (ST95005620AS Momentus XT) is either causing this by itself or in 'cooperation' with the hibernate/suspend or other Ubuntu functionality.
I installed the Seagate now 2 months ago and to get Ubuntu on my disk I copied (I believe using ddrescue or dd) my old HD content (that I replaced because of a few bad sectors) directly on this Hybrid drive. The drive has thus far shown no errors, and (as I program in Java quite a bit on big projects with 100s of modified files on this machine) no similar problems have occurred with different files.
The tex and bib files did have long filenames (including '&' sign). For now I have copied my work to new files but this does have me worried!
Some system info:
fdisk -l:
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0006f049
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 782335 390144 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 782336 20314111 9765888 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 20316158 976773119 478228481 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 20316160 59375615 19529728 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 59377664 98437119 19529728 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 98439168 976773119 439166976 83 Linux
One message in my syslog that could be related:
[ 251.033263] EXT4-fs (sda7): Unaligned AIO/DIO on inode 7474846 by VirtualBox; performance will be poor.
Searching for solutions for this however pointed me towards misalignment of the file systems in the vdi files itself (unless I misunderstood?).
Besides the tex files I believe I also changed icons on my launcher that later (next day) were set back, so possibly more modifications have been lost.
My hunch is that the SSD caching mechanism somehow loses its latest changes and reverts back to a version on the regular platter? Could the disk copy from my non-Hybrid drive to Hybrid drive have caused any issues?
Any thoughts are welcome, Thanks!