Empty files and folders on a shared area

Came in this morning and I am suddenly having trouble seeing or finding folders and files in a certain shared area on our file server. But when I check for free space under properties, I know the files are
still there since the amount of Used Space is still the same as before. When
I open up Microsoft Word or Real Player, I can still load the files listed
under "Most Recently Viewed" section, but when I actually go into the shared drive, none of the files show up.

What I noticed was all the files were showing as hidden, but even when i change the hidden attribute, I am not able to because it is greyed out. Even if I copy the files to my local hard drive I am still not able to change the hidden attribute.

I suspect that this is due to a virus, and I have run a full system scan to
remove any threats. But I still cannot see any folders or files. Sophos is not able detect any threats either.

I have tried going to Control Panel, Folder Options, View, and then select
"show hidden files," but it still doesn't work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

run a CMD prompt and run "attrib" it should tell you if they have any other attributes.
Like "system", which is also hidden by Microsoft.

If you want to reset try:
"attrib *.* /s -h" (for hidden files)
"attrib *.* /s -s" (for system files)

There's probably a GUI way to do this, but I've only just stopped using flag...

Please see attachment of what the directory looks like with this issue. thanks

Attrib command didnt work unfortuntly.

That is an unusual icon on the XLS, I thought, what does the little black square signify ?
According to:
The Old New Thing : What are those little overlay icons?

Quote:

---

A black clock. This really baffles people. This means that the file has been archived to tape and will take a very long time to access.

---

Are you sure the files are there ? Yeah, baffled, that's right.
Some software has :censored: your files, and not stayed for breakfast... What archive software are you using ?

I have no solution to fix this.

Sorry I'm back again with this same problem.

Its happened again but with a different shared folder this time. Roughly after 2 months after first posting.

I am struggling to understand why only this server is affected. The difference I see is the drive is a iSCSI target connected to a SNAP server rather than a drive which is actually on the server.

Due to the importance of the files the files are backed up every night onto a backup server. the backup script which runs is effectively a perl script which utilises xxcopy pro to copy the data from a remote location to the backup server. From my research it seems the backup software could also be the culprit but from the switches I have used it shouldn't cause any issues.

When I am on the server which is on server 2003 enterprise r2 when I go to the shared folder the directory is empty (even if I show all hidden files), when I right click the shared folder to check the size it is a large size which indicates that the files are there.

When I move the whole of the shared folder to my Win XP machine I can then see all the files but they are all shown as hidden but if i try to make them unhidden I am not able to due to the hidden tab being greyed out.

I just wanted to ask again to see if anyone has had similar issues or could point me in the right direction.

Thanks

I think you've already been pointed: If it happens to the set of files that you're backing up and there are little black clocks again then it seems very likely that your xxcopy program is trashing the source file and folder attributes. You'd have to ask the vendors why.

Attrib definitely won't fix that, nor I believe will Windows script (FSO won't touch the most significant bits of the attribute field) so to test this and/or sort it out you'll need a real app that can read/write the 'offline' attribute.

What's wrong with Robocopy anyway?

Solution

if you copy all the files onto another PC, then run attrib -s -h -r /s /d, this will then take the hidden attribute of all the folders and sub folders for the problem shared area.

then you can copy the files back and all is working.

Courtsey of Bdixon