Would loss of power during an FSCK cause something like this?

If everything disappeared from the partition, this means the root directory of that partition got hosed. Power loss during fsck could well have caused this, especially if the fsck in question was busily repairing earlier damage.

Re-running fsck then rebuilt your root directory, and stuffed all your content in the "lost+found" directory (which works like Unattached Items -- in fact, it's where we got the idea).

However, this process loses all the filenames, and so there's no programmatic way to recover everything out of lost+found again. So the player must sadly then delete anything that turns up in lost+found.

This deleting stuff in lost+found, was new in 1.1 (previous releases would just leave stuff in lost+found, so unless you were a Unix weenie able to retrieve it all, you ended up with a load of disc space taken up by useless files). In the current alpha the deleting is actually too keen and deletes the lost+found directory itself, which is not the Right Thing (and possibly confuses fsck).

Apart from trying to use fsck as little as possible, there's not much we can do to guard against power loss during fsck.

Peter