Had to reinstall game library on SteamOS

[POINTS:]

I unplugged my HDMI cable while cleaning and ended up powering off my computer thinking it hadn't booted up properly. (I pressed the power button and waited for it to power off instead of holding down the button and forcing it off.) I think steam may have been in the middle of an update because when I turned it back on, I had lost all of my games in my library!

Other than having to reinstall the games I was playing, recreating a few config files that aren't backed up, and losing my in progress achievements, getting it back up hasn't been too bad.

My question is, does anyone know what caused this? Was it because steam was in the middle of an update? Has this happened to anyone else? Obviously, I'd like to prevent this from happening again if possible.

[Zyro]

Probably not what you had, but I thought twice I had lost my game installations just because I had temporarilly unmounted the disc they're on. For the progress I switched to the "Steam Cloud". While not being a friend of cloudy stuff, this turned out to be a usefull feature. Being froced to replay parts of games s*cks.

[ProChaser [Linux]]

Even if you had forced to power off your system, Steam would just resume with downloading the games you were downloading. I can only imagine, that Steam lost the path to your games library. You can customize the path in steam settings.

[Sensei Aizen]

You can see information about your mounted file-systems in your system:

> cat /proc/fstab

Sometimes there are changes in your filesystem (example: You copy some stuff on your usb stick.). After this your system should rewrite the index-file (head) of your file-system.

It's like a phone book with adresses. The adress is the coordinate of your file. Your file manager is like 'google maps' where you can move to this adress or in real life you walk with a printed map to this location and where you can find something. (read, write)

Sometimes there can occours unpretty situations (bugs). You've written a file to your usb stick but the system could not write the adress where you can find it due of energy loss. In most cases the information where to find your copied files are gone away. It's like you are searching for a needle in a haystack if you want to recover those data. (similiar to forensic work. t's not like a simple delete (> rm ...) of a file which you can easy undone by recovering tools.).

Which filesystem are you using? The variety of filesystems having different solutions to prevent a loss of data.

[Kranky K. Krackpot]

You mean you simply pushed a power-button on the chassis and waited till it shut down? Actually, it's not a good idea at all...
I think the filesystem went broken because of power-cut, and because it was Steam that was modifying it (i.e. writing update files) at that time, you lost Steam's files and not others. It doesn't look like a Steam-specific problem.

[POINTS:]

Origineel geplaatst door Kranky K. Krackpot:

You mean you simply pushed a power-button on the chassis and waited till it shut down? Actually, it's not a good idea at all...
I think the filesystem went broken because of power-cut, and because it was Steam that was modifying it (i.e. writing update files) at that time, you lost Steam's files and not others. It doesn't look like a Steam-specific problem.

My assumption was that the system hadn't booted and was halted by the BIOS which was wrong. My guess too was that Steam was in the middle of an update and had to reinstall from scratch somehow losing my games too. Perhaps the update that was being installed also moved games.

I could see this being a problem for Steam Machines. Maybe they will have a better recovery system in the future.

[POINTS:]

Origineel geplaatst door MedicByCall:

You can see information about your mounted file-systems in your system:

> cat /proc/fstab

There isn't a /proc/fstab in SteamOS.

desktop@steamos:/$ cat /proc/fstab
cat: /proc/fstab: No such file or directory

Origineel geplaatst door MedicByCall:

Which filesystem are you using? The variety of filesystems having different solutions to prevent a loss of data.

It's the default for SteamOS. Here's the output of mount (with some sections removed):

desktop@steamos:/$ mount
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,relatime,size=10240k,nr_inodes=4117116,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=3295600k,mode=755)
/dev/disk/by-uuid/<...> on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered)
tmpfs on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k)
tmpfs on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=8591260k)
/dev/sda1 on /boot/efi type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=utf8,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/sda3 on /boot/recovery type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sda5 on /home type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)

It's possible that the recovery process for SteamOS cleared out the games when it ran.

[Dusk of Oolacile]

If Steam was in the middle of something and shutting down disrupted it, its config files might be damaged. You see, linux doesn't do what windows does. Once you initiate a shutdown, windows waits for processes to exit, then it shuts down. Linux just kills everything without a second thought, so there is no way for properly exiting Steam or any other program.

What can you do? Not shutting down while Steam is doing something. If you're paranoid, always exit steam before you shut down the OS. That's tiring though...

[Cybertao]

Origineel geplaatst door LOLCAT:

Linux just kills everything without a second thought

That's not true. Processes are sent a SIGTERM, politely requesting they exit cleanly, before being sent a SIGKILL as a last resort to close unresponsive or poorly written processes.

[Sensei Aizen]

Cybertao is right.

SIGKILL is like the silver bullet. It kills a process immediately.

SIGTERM allows the process to ignore termination-request or to call functions to terminate the process in a clean way (such as saving the state of files or cleaning up temporary files).

more here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_signal

[Kranky K. Krackpot]

The power-button on chassis hardly sends any signals. When pressed, it just waits a few secs (to prevent cut-off if pressed accidently), and then simply cuts the power. Pulling the power cord out of wall socket will do the same even faster.

[Dusk of Oolacile]

Origineel geplaatst door Cybertao:

Origineel geplaatst door LOLCAT:

Linux just kills everything without a second thought

That's not true. Processes are sent a SIGTERM, politely requesting they exit cleanly, before being sent a SIGKILL as a last resort to close unresponsive or poorly written processes.

Probably most programs are not written to look for this sigterm signal then, they ignore it, and that's the reason they're disrupted. Steam seems to be a good example. If you exit via menu, it syncs and takes seconds to shut down. If you initiate a logoff, Steam is dead within a fraction of a second.

[Cybertao]

Origineel geplaatst door Kranky K. Krackpot:

The power-button on chassis hardly sends any signals. When pressed, it just waits a few secs (to prevent cut-off if pressed accidently), and then simply cuts the power. Pulling the power cord out of wall socket will do the same even faster.

Wow! So much wrong for just one thread.

[Kranky K. Krackpot]

Origineel geplaatst door Cybertao:

Origineel geplaatst door Kranky K. Krackpot:

The power-button on chassis hardly sends any signals. When pressed, it just waits a few secs (to prevent cut-off if pressed accidently), and then simply cuts the power. Pulling the power cord out of wall socket will do the same even faster.

Wow! So much wrong for just one thread.

So you're welcome to correct it, and to show us how to make a physical power button to properly handle shutdown!
This is funny http://superuser.com/questions/237732/prevent-poweroff-on-debian-when-the-physical-power-button-is-pressed

[Cybertao]

It says it in that thread: pressing the power button triggers a ACPI event (which can be ignored or set to trigger something else such as suspend or hibernate).

You have to press and hold the power button for ten seconds to switch off the PSU, sometimes needed on Windows machines when an errant process hangs and prevents a safe shutdown.

[Kranky K. Krackpot]

Origineel geplaatst door Cybertao:

It says it in that thread: pressing the power button triggers a ACPI event (which can be ignored or set to trigger something else such as suspend or hibernate).

You have to press and hold the power button for ten seconds to switch off the PSU, sometimes needed on Windows machines when an errant process hangs and prevents a safe shutdown.

In other words, power-button itself doesn't send any SIGKILLs or shut down any programs, it just announces like "I'm pressed", waits for 10 secs and then cuts the power? Did I say something different, or I just didn't understand what you really meant?