I had a strange problem publishing an update to a website (Asp.Net Core 7, Razor Pages) to Azure earlier today. The website will display videos from a folder. Users upload these videos (think of it like a very simple youtube). After I published it, the website would not run at all.

Anyway, to solve the problem, I changed the Deployment Mode (during publish from VS 2022) to Self-contained. This seemed to fix the problem because now the website would run. I believe it was a missing framework issue.

However, as I go to test if I can play back a few videos, none of them play. So, I went to see them in the App Service Editor (web-based). However, the entire folder that contained the user submitted videos seems to have disappeared.

I’m the only one with access to this site (but there are other devs on the project), so I’m pretty sure it is not someone else. I certainly did not intend to delete anything. The code has no methods to delete anything. The video folder is not part of the project in Visual Studio but this has not changed in many months (and I publish a new version every 2-3 weeks).

So, is it possible that by changing the Deployment Mode to Self-contained than when I published this website, it could have deleted the folder with all the videos in it?

I’m kind of freaking out here. Any insights would be welcome.