Support

Hello Frank,

Please note that this a generic Joomla! question, normally not within the realm of our support system. However, since I know the answer, I will make an exception for you and reply to this thread.

When files get a size of zero, it means that your account went over quota or there was a hard drive failure. I bet the problem is that you went over quota. The first thing to do in this case is to remove unnecessary files. Start by deleting the contents of tmp, cache, administrator/cache and logs. If there are non-zero sized backups, download them and remove them from the site.

Next up, download the Joomla! update package from http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=6318 and extract it locally. Upload all extracted files to your site, overwriting existing ones. If, at this point, you can not log in to your site's back-end, please download the full installation package, extract it locally and upload it to your site.

Now go to Extensions, Extensions Manager. In the "Install Directory" field you'll see something like /home/myuser/public_html/tmp. Remove the /tmp part and click on Install. This will tell Joomla! to locate the joomla.xml file in the root of your site and install the updated Joomla! version. Note: you may have to disable the "System - System Restore Points" plugin before any of this is possible. If you get any errors while updating, please go to Extensions, Extensions Manager and click on Database. On that page, click on Fix.

After doing that, please give your site a thorough check. If something is not working, probably its files got zeroed out and you need to restore a backup.

Side note: never, ever, leave your backups on the same server as your site. A backup file which is not stored safely off your site's server is not a backup; when you need it the most, you won't have it. Always keep off-site copied of your backups.

Last time this happened to someone (a few weeks ago) -while restoring a backup nonetheless- I asked around to see what could be causing it. The most thorough reply I got was from the boss of a very well known hosting provider. He explained how going over quota can do that. I believe that he knows what he's saying :) If that was the case, or if a disk error happened, I think that using anything, including my software, would have caused exactly the same issue.

Oh, no, no offense taken. Besides, I only had a hunch what could be wrong in cases like that (it has never happened to me, so I couldn't know for sure). That's why I asked around and got responses from people who own hosting businesses and do server setup for a living – that's the only way for me to be sure that my hunch is not just a pile of horse manure ;)

Another thing which springs to mind is somehow using FTP to write to files causing this issue. It has happened to me on a client's live server just once (writing to files by FTP caused them to become truncated to 0 bytes). I am sure that this was a bad FTP setup.

Besides that, I can't think of anything else while not defying the Occam's Razor principle, i.e. all other possibilities are so complicated and so unlikely to happen that they are most likely not what happened. It would certainly help if the host had some opinion on the issue. I can tell within a safe margin of certainty that Joomla!'s updater doesn't do that (unless you tried upgrading from 1.7.0, it was buggy back then). Every time a Joomla! update comes out, I test it on my test servers using both Joomla!'s updater and Admin Tools – something which I won't have to do any more as Admin Tools' updater is now part of the Joomla! core. I've never seen that happening.