I had a directory named tmp that was not really meant to be for temporary (= throwaway) files, it was just called tmp. It was in one of my web directories.
The directory is still there but the files that were in it are gone.
Does Dreamhost clean out stuff that they think are temporary files, with some script or something?
I’m not totally excluding the possibility that I just screwed up and deleted the files by accident, but this whole thing does seem sort of odd. I’m not usually quite this confused.
I’d like to know so I don’t put stuff there again that gets deleted.
I didn’t ask customer support directly yet, figured I’d ask you lot.
DreamHost doesn’t mess with files in your home directory, with the exception of log files and making sure there’s a favicon file or two in your domain directory.
Are you running any scripts that rely on that tmp directory? Some of those do their own cleanup. If that’s not the case, then maybe it is you.
I’m for sure running nothing that would empty this directory. It just had static content and the directories above it have static content, or small hand-made cgi programs.
Very very strange.[hr]
This is interesting. How is the decision made what’s a temporary file? Would anything matching a " /tmp/ " file glob be considered a temporary file?
(And yes, I do realize that storing non-temporary files in a directory named “tmp” is a somewhat odd thing to do)
Andrew’s list is an “excludes” list for their backups. It won’t tamper with any of those files. They just don’t get backed up along with everything else.
Speaking of backups, the ones provided by DH are handy, but don’t rely on them for anything critical. They’ll probably be available should you need them, but you really should have your own.
But I’m inferring from this sentence – “but they aren’t backed up, and hence aren’t restored from backup if we have to do so” – that what happened is that shit happened: they had to backup or move all the stuff on some storage resource or other for some reason, and on the subsequent restore of that backup, my /tmp/ stuff didn’t make it back to Earth.
Oh well.
Of course it would have been cool if this ‘feature’ was documented somewhere, but if I have to be super honest, I probably would not have read that documentation and would have been none the wiser…
Well, may this thread serve as a warning to anyone weird enough to store quasi important stuff in a directory named “tmp”, and as a reminder to make backups (although, it seems the DH-one-button backups that I have stashed – somewhere – may also have omitted my poor files)
I think I’ll do my future backupping in a more manual and hands on way and apart from this I guess shit happens and that’s life
