FileBot

I've just realised the wonder of FileBot but just now I have a problem. The Windows chkdsk (disk check) utility deleted files from my hard drive that FileBot had renamed, but only the files that required "validating" because they would've had colons in them.

My files were on an external Seagate USB hard drive, which has one exFAT partition. I used Filebot on OS X (I use a Macbook on which I dual boot Windows and OSX) to rename a bunch of my TV shows. Wherever the name had a colon (or other character, but usually a colon) in it, I clicked "validate" and continued renaming.

I booted up into Windows today. It told me that my hard drive needed to be scanned with chkdsk - this happened quite a lot with Windows and my hard drive, and there was never anything wrong, it just told me to scan it so that it would stop harassing me about it.
So I scanned it, it told me there were some file system errors, and my disk was all nice and fresh again.

Except lots of my TV shows were gone.

It took me a while to realise how the files were deleted, since it seemed random at first. It was definitely files that required the "validate" button, where they would have otherwise had a colon in them. Some individual episodes of TV shows were gone, and some entire TV shows (where the name of the show had a colon).

So really I have no idea what happened. The file names definitely didn't have a colon (because that wouldn't work in either OS X or Windows), but there must have been some entry associated with them that perhaps did have the colon, which Windows didn't like and caused them to be deleted. There was definitely nothing wrong with the files themselves, because they worked fine on OS X after being renamed.

The remains of CHKDSK deleted files go in a FOUND.000 folder on the hard drive, but most of them are fragmented and unrecoverable, so it looks like I'll have a lot of downloading to do. That doesn't really bother me much, I'd just like Filebot to be able to rename them again once I've downloaded them a second time, and make sure they're not deleted!

I don't think I can provide any data/logs at the moment, since the relevant files are gone, but if there is anything I can provide that would help fix the problem, let me know.

If filebot "validates" the filename it does so before any renaming, so once you rename the files it does not matter if the original name had a colon or not. As far as the filesystem is concerned, it never had. Also from a security perspective application cannot in anyway corrupt the filesystem, even if they wanted to.

The first thing I would try to see if the files renamed by filebot really really are 100% binary equal to files manually renamed. If "Steins Gate" is really equal to "Steins Gate" then it can't not work as there is no difference. But in the Unicode world different code sequences can result in the same characters, even though they're not the same on the binary level. I would look into that first.

You might wanna look into xattr as well. FileBot tries to set xattr, which are not supported on exFAT, so it would naturally fail, but maybe the OSX exFAT implementation does something else instead that's only compatible with OSX.

I suspect an incompatibility between the Mac and Windows exFAT filesystem implementations. So from that point of view it's highly unlikely filebot has anything to do with it, so I'll need hard evidence to convince me otherwise.