By gafir777 on

Hi,

I've been running Drupal on IIS successfully quite a while, and I've been using various modules that upload files to /sites/default/files and sub-directories. Quite suddenly, all these files disappeared from the website. These include images and the like. When I log into my ftp I can see they are here, but it's like Drupal doesn't have access to them anymore.

Since I changed nothing to my configuration, I thought it would probably have to do something with my shared hosting provider, but they have not given any answer on the issue. Most of the images in the website are generated with imageCache, but they are not accessible anymore. For instance, if I go in the imageCache page to create a preset, all I see as a preview is the link (/sites/default/files/imagecache/bookcover/imagecache_sample.png?1245983580), not the actual image.

If you have any recommendation to make on how to address this issue, that would be great. Thanks!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

gafir777’s picture

gafir777 commented

Also, another very weird thing I just noticed, all the files that are in /sites/default/files now have pages of content created automatically with very weird names similar to the path of images uploaded with the imagefield, here is an example: sitesdefaultfilessitesdefaultfilessitesdefaultfilesimagefield_thumbsthumbnailall-in-family.jpg
I have hundreds of those, for each image, or FLV files.
The rest of the content is still there, but why have these pages been created?

Of course, I didn't do anything like that. It's like the whole website got screwed after running cron (!)... Quite confusing

gafir777’s picture

gafir777 commented

One more thing, if I look into my /sites/default/files directory, all the files have been taken away from their original subdirectory, and renamed like the following:

sitesdefaultfilessitesdefaultfilessitesdefaultfilessitesdefaultfilessitesdefaultfilesvideopart5.flv

This probably makes them impossible to find.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

gafir777’s picture

gafir777 commented

Looking at these weird nodes in the database, I found they are of type: videogen

No idea what this is, never created it.

gafir777’s picture

gafir777 commented

Looking into the files table, I see that the file name are right, and the file paths are right too. Only the physically created files have whatever name defaultsitedefaultsite and so on. In the pages themselves, the Only local images are allowed. tags are trying to find the images with the right path. This means that what's creating the actual files is naming them wrongly.

audaciousweb’s picture

audaciousweb commented

Have you checked the file permissions.. maybe they have been changed to not be readable?

gafir777’s picture

gafir777 commented

Hi,

THanks for your answer. I have checked the file permissions from the control panel, and you have access and write permissions. It's like the ImageCache files and other files are not correctly going to their intended folder, instead, they land on /sites/default/files rather than the subdirs and they are named with defaultsitesdefaultsites.

audaciousweb’s picture

audaciousweb commented

sounds like a bad problem then like some file became corrupted or something, do you have a backup you can restore? Sorry I can't be of more help but maybe someone else can.

Did you move the site at all? Something that happened with me when I moved a site recently was I forgot to move the hidden files so that broke the site.

One other thought is maybe the site was hacked? Its unfortunate if that happened but unfortunately its a possibility.

On a side note: I have had loads of problems with shared hosting providers. I was using one site on a dotster shared host one day and all of a sudden one day I couldn't write to any mysql databases, even when I created new databases, etc.. I contacted them and they told me that everything was working fine, after numerous tests on my part I couldn't get it to work, bottom line is a lot of shared hosts can be bad to deal with, I have moved everything I host to a cloud hosting provider and just run my own virtual linux server, just something I recommend since it keeps these mysterious things from happening with the shared hosts, you can backup the full cloud host so its easy to restore the system to the way it was when it was working.