ANOTHER picture/attachment problem

[dknelson99]

OK....I lost MOST of the pictures and attachments after updating to 4.2.3. Very irritating but I've very slowly been adding some of them back.

Now just TODAY...I got an email from a member telling me that his pictures went away today. There is a thread going on right now that he started asking other members to post pictures. A lot of people have. But just today, the guy that started the thread reported that pictures in his own posts have gone away. It makes no sense. This thread was just started a couple of weeks ago....long after the upgrade to 4.2.3. His pictures have been there for several days and now gone.

All his posts with pictures look something like this:

Attachment 103665Unknown:

Michigan Light House.

Until today, his pictures were showing up in the post, NOT having to click on an attachment. Now if you even click on the link it says Invalid Attachment specified.

Other posts in the thread and others are still showing as they should but this is concerning. How may more is it going to happen to?

[Mark.B]

Can you please upgrade to the 4.2.4 Beta as soon as you can? (It's ok to use this beta on production sites).

Without getting too technical on this, you've an issue with your attachment 'refcounts' which is causing the cron job to consider them 'unused' and thus it deletes them.
4.2.4 will fix the refcounts for you and then it will stop happening.

[dknelson99]

OK...I just upgraded to 4.2.4 Beta. I take it the attachments are again gone and will have to be replace one by one? I would like to know why this happened AGAIN. We were told that the problem was in older versions and recent fixes caused them to show up. These attachments were uploaded AFTER the upgrade to 4.2.3 though. Why would the refcounts be incorrect again on new posts and what causes them to disappear after a few days? I guess I want to know if this is actually fixed or is going to continue? This is a really major issue and I'm surprised more people aren't extremely upset over it.

[dknelson99]

Would it be possible to get a response here?

[Mark.B]

It didn't happen again. The issue is that you had a forum with corrupted / incorrect refcount values, which causes all your attachments to be marked as 'unused'.

vBulletin was always supposed to delete attachments marked as unused. However for years this hasn't worked. In 4.2.3, this bug was fixed, but this has had the unintended consequence of deleting all attachments on sites where the attachment refcounts have become corrupted.

In 4.2.4 Paul M added a step in the upgrade script that should fix corrupted refcounts. That should mean you don't lose any further attachments.

It's possible Paul himself may come and explain this in a more technical way than I have, but hopefully you get the idea.

[dknelson99]

Either you aren't understanding what I'm asking or I'm not understanding your answer. I KNOW what you say caused this the first time. Bugs in older versions that were finally exploited when we upgraded to 4.2.3. According to VBulletin, the upgrade caused these attachments to get deleted to to bugs in older versions. I get that.

That happened to me. THOUSANDS of attachments were deleted when I upgraded. That is why I have been slowly and manually editing some of the more important posts and adding the attachments back.

When I say it happened AGAIN...a MONTH or longer AFTER the upgrade, something is still causing attachments to be deleted. Just this week, what appears to be there exact same thing happened again. Attachments from newer posts, AFTER the upgrade to 4.2.3, were suddenly missing just as before. No upgrades or further changes have been made. Nothing at all was done to the software. No upgrades, no new mods added, nothing. But more attachments disappeared. They are still in the VBAttach folders but are missing from the posts, just as happened after the upgrade.

So, that is what I day that it happened again. Why do you say that it DIDN'T happen again. I can show you where it did. If it is being caused by incorrect refcount values, why are new posts still getting incorrect values and what script is causing the attachments to be removed at random times.

There is still a problem. You told me to upgrade to the newest beta version so I did. But how can you tell me that upgrading to the new version will correct a problem that you are now saying didn't happen again?

[IggyP]

he said the fix was in 4.2.4 so it shouldnt be confuse why a 4.2.3 continues the bug?

[dknelson99]

If that is the case then that's fine. My confusion came from the fact that this last loss did NOT happen during an upgrade which they said was what caused it the first time. It also doesn't explain while some current attachments are ending up with an incorrect checksum value. The last I read, they had not figured out what was causing that in the first place. So it seems to me that the incorrect checksum value is the main problem. So apparently there are still files that are somehow getting assigned an incorrect checksum value and some script is deleting them not just when you do an upgrade but at other random times. Hourly cleanup or what?

[Wayne Luke]

The only attachments that we delete are ones that are not assigned to a post. If you have attachments deleted from posts, then there is a problem with your database. it is missing a field that was added in the upgrade process or the data is corrupt. There is no way we can work around that. In order to see why your attachments are being deleted, we would need access to a database from before your upgrade. That is where it needs to be fixed, not after the upgrade. This is one reason why we don't recommend upgrading your live site first but a copy. So if something like this happens, you can fix it before upgrading the live site.

[dknelson99]

They WERE assigned to a post. A post was made. Pictures were attached. They were there for 3 or 4 days. Suddenly they are gone. They are still in the VBAttach folder but the post just has a link to the attachment where the picture was. You click on that and it says "invalid attachment". This started when YOU updated my site. I paid to have it done. Now the problems continue. Now it apparently happens NOT just during an upgrade but at random times.

[Mark.B]

I've explained what happened. The recount values were corrupt. This means that ALL your attachments were marked as unused. Unused normally means that the post the attachment was in has been deleted, however in your case the values were corrupted at some unknown time in the past.

When the bug with the script that automatically deletes unused attachments was fixed, all your attachments got deleted. Not as part of the upgrade, but as part of the script that runs daily to remove attachments that are marked as unused. There is no way we could have known about this issue at the time your upgrade was done because we did not know you had corrupted refcount values.

As a result of the small number of customers who ran into this, we added a refcount check into the 4.2.4 upgrade script which should fix the refcount values if they are corrupt.

[dknelson99]

ok....I guess we wait and see. You folks seem to feel that I don't understand what happened. I do, I've seen it explained several times here and in other threads. I get it. I know that due to the checksum value that a lot of attachments were deleted. I do understand that. What I don't understand is what caused that value to be incorrect and why, after they were deleted during the upgrade process, there are obviously STILL some that are getting deleted when that daily script runs. Ones that were just recently posted. Nobody seems to be able to answer that.

[Mark.B]

It's because the upgrade to 4 2. 3 dud not address the recount issue. It couldn't, because at that point we didn't know it was an issue.

We do not know how recounts became corrupted on a small number of sites, and we never will. It most likely happened many years in the past. New attachments continued to be affected because whatever caused the corruption was still affecting new entries as well.

This was addressed in 4.2.4.

We won't ever be able to tell you how your recounts got corrupted because we cannot possibly know unless someone invents a time machine.

[dknelson99]

OK....so you are saying that it was addressed in 4.2.4. I have that installed now so it shouldn't be a problem. I understood that during the upgrade to 4.2.4 that there was a script added that checked for that and corrected any such issues so that files were not removed during the upgrade process. I get that. Were there also changes made though that prevents the daily script from removing such files as well? Like I keep saying, this has happened recently, NOT during the upgrade process apparently when the daily script was run.

[Mark.B]

The daily script is SUPPOSED to remove such files. It is there to remove attachments that are marked as unused. Your issue was that ALL your attachments were marked as unused.

[dknelson99]

We'll see. I have checked the database. There are none that are marked unused. Like you said, I have no time machine so can't go back and look as how they were marked before.