Folders disappearing

[ChiVay]

Our setup is in AWS S3 bucket. I am aware that the S3 bucket does not technically contain "folders" and when a file comes in, the folder appears, once picked up, the folder disappears. With this in mind, I don't believe the issue I am having is related to AWS S3.

Let me explain the situation. My Support Team uses Filezilla to review folders to ensure that files inbound or outbound are being picked up / processed. Sometimes either the root folder disappear or subfolders disappear. We have 314 root folders. This issue does not occur with all folders, on a given day we might see between 2 and 5 folders disappear, this situation has occurred 5-6 times within a year, it is seemingly random as it is never the same folders, same day of week or same time of day. The only way we know of this problem is someone connecting to our sFTP sends a screenshot of the error stating the folder does not exist. A short time later, the folder reappears with nothing in it, the person reconnects and is able to pickup or drop files, then the folder disappears.

This issue of disappearing folders on the FTP is perplexing because the folders ALWAYS are always displayed on the FTP whether there are files in it or not. Below is a screenshot as reference of a folder with no files and still displaying.

We were thinking that maybe the person connecting accidentally deleted folders or ran an incorrect script that deleted folders. We contact the parties who reported the issue, they all maintain they did not do anything abnormal. They have a scheduled task either every 15 mins or 1hr to connect pickup or drop files.

One interesting thing note is that if we see the folder disappear or we notice it is gone, we manually add it back, when doing this, the folder stays put / does not disappear.

Please note that, 0KB file will not work for us because we use LogicMonitor and it would constantly alert that there is a file that has not been picked up. We also cannot put in a parameter on file name as there is no set naming convention for the files.

Anyone see this before or have any ideas on why the folders would suddenly disappear, but also, why does it stay when manually added back?

[botg]

While S3 does not have directories, the common convention is to create an empty file who's name is the full path of the directory, including the terminating slash, when manually creating a directory.