During a routine log pruning job where logs older than 60 days were being removed, a system administrator upgraded CDH from 4.3 to 4.6, (I know, I know)...
Normally, the log pruning job frees about 40% of HDFS's available storage. However, during the upgrade, datanodes went down, were rebooted, and all sorts of madness.
What's known is that HDFS received the delete commands, since the HDFS files / folders no longer exist, but disk utilization is still unchanged.
My question is, could HDFS have removed the files from the NameNode's metadata without actually fulfilling the file block deletes among the DataNodes, effectively orphaning the file blocks?