The case of the undeletable files

Recently came across a few spooky IT-related situations.

Let’s start with the story of my company’s NAS.

It’s a QNAP TS-201 with 2 150GB harddisks configured in mirror raid. When the disks have less than 10GB space, it will emit a beeping sound like every 10 minutes and I’ll have to clear it’s “Recycle Bin” to free up space.

When you delete files on a NAS, it gets deleted instantly unlike deleting files on your desktop where it goes to the recycle bin first.

So I sent in a request for some new 1TB drives to upgrade to. Spent my weekend upgrading it because that’s when no one needs access to it.

When Monday came, I got a report that excel was creating .tmp files when saving the document and they weren’t deleted when the excel file is closed. When I tried to delete the .tmp files manually, the files disappear but reappear when the page is refreshed.

Thinking it was an access issue, I SSH-ed in and set ownership to Guest, group to Everyone, chmod777 every file but it still didn’t work.

Then I decided to try SSH into our second NAS which is used only by my department. I compared the folder structure of both NASes and see that there’s a missing “Network Recycle Bin 1” folder on the upgraded NAS.

To fix this, I logged into the web administration panel of the NAS, went to the Network Recycle Bin page, the checkbox that enables this feature is already ticked, so all I did is just click the save button.

I checked the folder structure and see that the folder has been recreated.

Tried to delete a file and it worked.

Case solved.