Retreiving deleted attachments

[Sourish Ghosh]

We are using Confluence version 3.4.2. We find that certain attachments in a Space are missing.

When we tried to access them, an error message:

"The attachment you were trying to download could not be found in the attachment file store. Either the file has been removed manually or there was an error in removing the record of the attachment from Confluence.

If this attachment is no longer required you can remove it from Confluence on the attachments page. Otherwise, you will need to attach a new copy."

popped up.

Please let us know how to retreive and restore them back.

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi,

is there something special with the name of the missing attachments ? We had a strange problem with attachments that have non-ascii-values in their name (German Umlauts).

They were definitely there, but could not be found by the application. The problem was a language parameter in the profile of the Solaris User.

You should check the attachments folder on the file system. If the missing files are definitely not there, it cannot be retrieved by any admin panel at all.

Best regards and good luck

Thomas

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

That's od. Someone surely might have messed up with the file system? If you don't have a backup of the folders or the VM, you can't retireve it!

[Sourish Ghosh]

Hi,

We dont keep daily backups for attachments as it eats away a lot of space.

Is there no way we can retrieve it from the admin panel or something?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think you're misunderstanding what Jobin is trying to tell you. The error you have means that the file that Confluence thinks is attached is no longer there. It's either been deleted, renamed or moved. There's no file recovery option because that's a function of the operating system, not Confluence.

If it's been renamed or moved, then you need to find it and undo the change. If it's been deleted, then you need to restore it from a backup (although some file systems allow an undelete if the disk area hasn't been overwritten, you're deep into "do stuff in the operating system")