this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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I just lost 44 GB of data that I downloaded in the past two hours. My PC started to get laggy and it got stuck so I just shut it down believing that all will be well since the data has already been written to disk..

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[–] AProfessional 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is incorrect too. The OS buffers writes to drives for performance, a portion is kept in memory and flushed to disk when possible. A sudden power loss can easily result in a partial write.

That said a drive failure is also possible.

The filesystems journal will be the source of truth.

[–] kaitco 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

44 GB over two hours, though? If it were the last couple GBs in the last maybe 10 ten minutes, but unless the OP is running a PC from 2002, the data should have already moved from RAM to disk in that time.

But yeah, the filesystem journal will explain what happened there.

[–] AProfessional 6 points 1 year ago

I agree unless it was a single file download.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The buffer is flushed every 6 seconds. OP was pulling down 44GB/7200sec = 6MB/s. OP would have only lost 36MB to disk caching.

If it was a single 44GB file and OP turned off less than 6 seconds after it finished, then it could have been caching. But that’s very unlikely.