So there I was minding my own busines, and suddenly one scene started crashing, well since I had this issue before with unity, I figured I’ll just export the prefabs into another scene, no biggie. And suddenly, boom one folder dissapears in my project. The folder that was containing all my race track models, gone forever.
This leads me to a very simple question, what the actual f*ck was that?
Someone not using version control or at least making backups?
I do backups, and I can just simply drag the track folder back in. But that’s not the point. My point is that, this happened in an unnatural way. 2/3 gigs dissapeared within seconds, like someone is involved. I’m thinking that I may got hacked.
I do use antivirus software and other malware removal applications, and I know how computers work. But this action made no sense at all.
So I want confirmation, that this kind of “random super fast data disapearing” is some sort of a unity bug, or someone is trying to slow me down with my work. If thats the case, then I’ll have to take leegal actions against that person. Problem is that I’ll have to identify him/her first…
Edit: yes I said “gone forever”, but I said it more in a emotional frustration. Because backups are obviously outdated a bit, and I’ll need to fix some shader/material work when I use the tracks from backups.
Maybe your inodes or whatever they call those in Windows have been corrupted though it takes using both a OS crash and a bit of bad luck for that though not always. Sectors do fail on hard drives.
The other possibility is you are versioning your files/file systems automatically (via a 3rd party source control product, backup product, or OS core backup product - if you are using more than one there are possibly conflicts) and an automated restore was done.
It’s also possible you are hacked but that’s why most torrents and other peer to peer schemes (there are usually one or more interested parties at the top of a few pyramid schemes abusing that ‘trusted access’), visiting warez sights and such is never cool or smart.
Most likely a bad sector on your disk. Frequent disk access exposes disk sectors to such failures.
Good thing is that My work was done, and this incidence, does not slow down my plan’s. I was just playing around to find bugs. … and well seems I found one lol
Anyway my OS did not crash, it was slow for some reason yes, but it did not crash, no erros no nothing, everything was normal in that case.
I dont use versioning, because I simply dont trust automated version control systems, and what goat describet, is exactly the reason, there can be conflicts. So I do backups manually.
As for sector failing, this should be visible somewhere? My PC is set up to defragment and analyze hardrives everyday at 3 in the night when im sleeping. Shouldnt that pop up a error message or something when a bad sector is found?
10 years ago I had an incidence where my hardrive died with a badsector, the harddrive was making strange clicking noise after that, so yeah hardrive damage is possible, but not like the way I just experienced, I wish there was an action log in windows, where I can see every action done in the last 24h maybe. This way I could see if the files were deleted by a comand or there was an error.
That’s a bit excessive scanning and defragmenting schedule as most modern OS use algorithms that keep thing in pretty good shape with weekly scanning and defragmenting. If you have an magnetic HD it is only extra stress on the disk. If a sector fails it will be found out when the next access is attempted. The reason why scanning was done in the past and present was to mark sectors bad (or that were going bad) before the OS tries to use them. If something is on a failing sector the OS will try to relocate the data. That’s an important part of all this data versioning present in Windows 7 & 8 now. If you have that turned it would be very difficult to loose a directory to a failed sector.
No, sectors failure is often hidden from the user by the HD BIOS and OS Kernel. It’s one of those things they don’t should because it will only cause the average user to waste an excessive amount of money on ‘protection’ and it’s so infrequent too. If you do a full scan of your HD which could take quite a bit of time with a 3rd party solution that maps the individuals sectors as it scans them it’ll tell you if those sectors failed on you. There should also be entries in the Even Log but don’t confuse a failed sector with a drive not ready or responding message (i.e. the desired resources is on a drive that is asleep). The newest scan & repair of drives in Windows will tell you nothing about a failed sector if the failed sector has happened in the past & windows knows about it already. I’ve done a full scan with Windows 8.1 and it didn’t find problems (an SSD and a magnetic HD) but you can’t see anything of it’s scan progress really and I didn’t check the event log afterwards so I can’t be sure. I have an SSD as my OS / Data drive now and I am very unfamiliar with how they work compared to magnetic HDs.
I’ve only had sectors fail but only a few times. Once was poor hardware and the other time was the disks got to hot, cooled, too hot, cooled - often large temperature fluctuations can computer HW failures.
At work however, I often found failed sectors and disks which is why we always had mirrors & incremental backups. For my on-again / off-again interest in creating a game though I don’t do but a backup every few months.
You can get the behavior you describe by pulling plug on the power to computer rather than shutdown but you have to be unlucky too although I wouldn’t make a habit of that way of turning off a computer.
if your work is gone for good… it might not be… google for “recover deleted files” … hard drives just mark files as “deleted” and available to be overwritten …but they still may exist on disk if you havent added alot of files since then…
… hmm i guess i dont know if thats the case with solid state drives… i only know so much about hard disk drives…
Or run a defragment utility every single day like the OP.
lol ive never once defraged any of my computers lol (but should)
If you are on Windows Vista or newer, there is an automatic defragment utility that is enabled by default.
Try a search your computer for the files names, you may have accidentally moved it. Or possibly during your export you named something similar an overwrote it. Did it (the folder) have a unusual name or special characters in the name? It’s pretty certain you weren’t hacked and unlikely it was a Unity error. More than likely it was something you accidentally did or possibly something your system was doing.
Do your scene/other prefabs that point the missing objects say the elements are missing (like in mesh filter), or are the references gone as well? If the references are just gone, that would suggest that it was something that was done in/from Unity. If has references but say “missing” that would suggest that it was something that happened outside of Unity (file system). It may not help recover anything, but at least that would help you isolate where the problem happened.
We had something like this happen working on a Skylanders game. Had to do with deleted .meta files. Next morning entire folders of work vanished.