Sorry to hear of your continued trouble. I’m unaware of any functionality in core WP that would bulk delete all media files of any type. It takes some concerted effort to manually delete any more than a list table page’s worth of media at once using the WP UI. (default 20)
You’ve no plugin that is supposed to clean up or optimize your site in any way? That’s the only thing I could think of that could be remotely responsible. Running a poorly considered file system command could wipe out a lot of files. Unless you can find a way to reliably induce the behavior, it may be difficult to track down the source.
I generally wouldn’t suspect your host of being responsible, unless maybe your files infringed on copyright and the host was forced to remove them due to a take down notice. Even then, I’d hope they would notify you of their action.
Thank you for the response. 🙂
I only had a few plugins installed. I have even fewer now after noticing that one can purge cache (Lite something). Probably isn’t the cause but I uninstalled anyway.
Hosts do deny all knowledge, files are not infringing on copyright and the dates this seems to happen are so arbitrary it looks malicious rather than automated. But that makes no sense.
Thank you again 😊
I thought I would update this as, unbelievably, this happened again. And though it’s not WordPress related someone may have the same problem.
It was my host. I won’t publish their name, but these guys have just informed me that I’m “on the wrong package” so all of my audio or video will be deleted automatically. I am furious as I asked them repeatedly to check my package was correct, and whether they had an automatic process that was deleting my files.
So it seems that they can delete my files, on a server I pay for, on a domain I own, if they feel like it. This happened 3 times over the last couple of years always on arbitrary dates so it’s not as easy how’s it being an automated process run, say, monthly.
Mini rant over, so if anyone experiences the same, its your hosts.
Thanks
Sorry for the typo. Will mark as resolved.