Now you see it…. Now You don’t

Last week our media director, the new user of the MacPro, called and said his files were gone off a directory on his windows machine.  We use a shared directory on the PC in the tech booth as a temporary landing place for the media files that are going to be transferred to the hard drive based playback unit that plays all video for our main stage events.

We use this ‘transfer’ folder to stage the files to ftp to the Ederol since the internal FTP server on the Ederol is quite flaky and it helps sit right right at the unit to do the transfer (Roland said it doesn’t get any better so we found a good work around).

So a week after the MacPro and the newly reformatted G5 were in production we noticed files just disappearing out of the transfer directory.  After closer inspection the files would copy over the network, then when the file is completely copied it deletes off the PC.  File transfers from a PC to this directory work fine.  So we decided maybe its a root permissions issue in the OS so we reformatted the PC… but the problem remains.

We have specifically narrowed it down to file transfer from two macs and it only fails if there are no files in this directory.  If there is a blank .txt file in this directory all is good, if the directory is empty the copy from the Mac fails.

Worst thing about this is if we call either Windows or Apple support its going to be a blame game I am sure…

Nothing more frustrating than identifying the problem and having no solutions…. What are your Thoughts?