[Paragon NTFS] Filebot corrupted my movies! Please help!

[brandawg93]

Macbook Pro (Yosemite)
installed through caskbrew.
So I went through most of the thousands of movies I had on my ntfs external hdd and renamed them with my preferred naming convention. After doing so, I can watch the movies until I unmount my hdd and remount it. From then on my files become corrupted and work in neither quicktime or vlc. This issue is reproducible. Please someone tell me how I can recover my movies! I have already tried reverting the filenames. They revert but the files remain corrupted. I have also run disk utility's verify function, which says nothing is wrong. Please Help!

[rednoah]

Can you find out what's wrong with the files?

Also, Mac OS X only supports NTFS in read-only mode, so you could not have possibly renamed files on an NTFS volume without some external software. I would post a bug report there.

[brandawg93]

I have paragon to work with a ntfs drive. I did this before with the same software when the Mac version of filebot was free and it worked fine. Anyways, I thought filebot only touched the name of the file and not the file itself. Why would the file itself be corrupted after filebot only renaming it?
Edit: I tried renaming single files myself, unmounting and remounting the drive, and they still work. Only after rename with filebot do they become corrupted.

[rednoah]

Then I guess Paragon NTFS is still has some bugs.

Rename operations probably involve:
1. Rename the file
2. Set permissions (implicitly part of the rename operation)
3. Store metadata via xattr (also known as Alternate Data Streams in the Windows/NTFS world)

None of these operations affects the file content.

(of course, if the filesystem drivers are faulty then all bets are off)

I'm sure 1. and 2. is very well-tested which leaves 3. xattr support, which is probably not really tested that well. So my guess is that their implementation for xattr is faulty. If Paragon NTFS allows you to turn off xattr support (which is apparently faulty) then I'd try that first.

I'd try reading files on Windows and see if it works just out of curiosity.

PS: You can also make FileBot not use xattr by adding the -no-xattr switch to the cmdline arguments.

[brandawg93]

I'm pretty sure you're right about the three. When renaming myself, it works just fine; all permissions are 777, yet I guess something is going wrong with xattr.

I don't currently have access to my windows machine as I am out of town but I was wondering if they would work on there as well. Would xattr corrupt files or is there an easy fix? I'd really rather not redownload about 500 movies. And is there any way to make the GUI use -no-xattr by default?

P.S. Thanks for the quick response! It's rare to see support like this!

EDIT: I tried typing into terminal xattr 'corrupted file' and it returns "com.apple.quarantine"...curious...

[rednoah]

Don't worry. The com.apple.quarantine is an xattr set by Finder and other Apple programs. They use xattr too.

FileBot xattr would be net.filebot.* as seen here => viewtopic.php?f=3&t=324

If you call filebot -no-xattr it should spawn the GUI with that option set. If you want to set it for the whole *.app package then you will need to modify the Info.plist and modify the JVMOptions.

I recall a issue with some NAS which reported all files to be 0 bytes if the file has xattr. In that case deleting xattr "restored" the files. These kind of bugs never really make sense though, until you check the code and see where things go wrong.

[brandawg93]

The files show their appropriate sizes. How would I go about deleting xattr to restore my files?

[rednoah]

I'd start with man xattr

Code: Select all

man xattr

Also, this script might help:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5#p5394

[brandawg93]

Thanks so much! I'll try working on it when I get back to town. So correct me if I'm wrong but if the files work on my windows machine we can be about 90% sure that it is an xattr problem?

[rednoah]

I'd test with Windows just to see if you can restore the files. Windows sets the NTFS standard. May work, may crash Windows NTFS drivers.

By trying renaming with xattr / without xattr you can make 100% sure that it's a xattr problem or not.

[brandawg93]

Ok, I tested the files on Windows. They don't work on there either. What would be the next logical step to take to fix this problem?

EDIT: Can confirm, I just opened filebot with -no-xattr via terminal, renamed a file, unmounted and remounted, and the file still works. It is a xattr problem.

[rednoah]

Then I got no idea other than reporting the issue to Paragon NTFS.

If the file system entries are corrupted that's pretty bad. The data didn't physically disappear so some Windows/NTFS recovery utilities might work. At this point you probably wanna check in other forums and ask people that know about data recovery.