On Sun, 2008-09-28 at 12:20 +0100, Stewart Williams wrote:

Hi all,

Can anyone explain or give an clues as to what just happened?

I'm running CentOS 5.2 as a desktop with Gnome. Fully up to date, etc.

I was dragging a folder of image (.jpg) files to another folder on the same filesystem (LVM ext3) with the mouse and as I dropped the folder into the new folder - poof! - it disappeared like a puff of smoke.

I've searched everywhere for the files/and or folder and they are totally gone.

I must also point out that the filesystem was an encrypted one using fuse-encfs.

In all my years of using Linux, I've never seen this happen before.

Sadly I have no backup as I'd just copied them from an SD card to the HDD then formated the card - maybe I was too quick doing that step.

As with your experience, I doubt that it's really gone. More likely you just can't find it.

I suggest using find (man find) to look for one of the files that is contained only in that folder. E.g.

find /home/<user>/ -iname abc.jpg

If you don't know a precise file name, surround it with single quotes and use a meta-character, e.g.

find /home/<user>/ -iname 'a*.jpg'

Good luck.

HTH