Public bug reported: Hello,
this bug was originally reported on https://github.com/ubuntu/snapcraft- desktop-helpers/issues/205 where I added a comment with my experience ( https://github.com/ubuntu/snapcraft-desktop- helpers/issues/205#issuecomment-696781060 ). I thought creating a bug report on Launchpad in addition would maybe help to track this issue. The following has happened to me for two times so far: 1) Tried to start Chromium (one time it was via UI/.desktop file, one time it was by running 'chromium-browser' in terminal) 2) Chromium didn't launch but instead the helper script 'desktop-launch' (in /snap/chromium/1320/bin/desktop-launch) moved files and folders that are located on a separate partition to my home directory (detailed description below) until I killed it. Luckily I had a backup, but it caused some work to restore everything. Really eerie experience, when all of a sudden my files began to get messed up. My setup is as follows: The / and /home directory of my main installation (Kubuntu 20.04) are on a SSD drive, while there is also a much bigger HDD as a second drive where I store all of my "bigger" data (photos, music, videos etc.). The HDD partition is mounted unter /mnt/my_hdd and there are symbolic links in my home directory to its directories (e.g. ~/photos is a symlink to /mnt/my_hdd/photos). Now what desktop-launch seemed to do was to move the files and directorys of this symlinked directories (HDD) to my home directory (SSD). E.g. ~/photos/* (actually stored on /mnt/my_hdd/photos/) was moved to ~/*. Subdirectories like photos/album1 were kept intact, but all the content of the "top level folders" of my HDD (music, videos, photos, ...) got mixed up together in my home directory. In both cases I noticed there's something going wrong and managed to kill desktop-launch after a short time, otherwise, it would have filled up all the small space on my SSD. This can be a cause of data loss without having a backup, because 1) it destroys directory structures by moving files/folders from different directories into one (as described above), and 2) related to that mv could silently overwrite files with different ones which have the same name. Can I provide any further information to help to debug this? I'm not sure how I can reproduce this, since in all cases except the two ones recently Chromium startup worked just fine. Fortunately I'm using Chromium only for testing purposes, so I don't launch it that often and can make btrfs snapshots before doing so and taking that risk again. Kind regards, Jan ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04 Package: chromium-browser (not installed) ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-48.52-generic 5.4.60 Uname: Linux 5.4.0-48-generic x86_64 ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.9 Architecture: amd64 CasperMD5CheckResult: skip CurrentDesktop: KDE Date: Sat Oct 3 09:19:51 2020 InstallationDate: Installed on 2020-04-08 (177 days ago) InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" - Beta amd64 (20200408) SourcePackage: chromium-browser UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install) ** Affects: chromium-browser (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Status: New ** Tags: amd64 apport-bug focal -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1898334 Title: When starting Chromium, desktop-launch sometimes moves personal files and folders on separate partition to my home directoy To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1898334/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs