Not sure if this is actually what happened, but it seems quite likely and I’m not too keen on checking again.
Basically, I use Linux at work, and I have a symbolic link that points to whichever version of a project I happen to be currently working on. Works fairly well, and means I don’t have to update a bunch of configuration information each time I check out a new branch from SVN.
However, it would seem that, if I rename the directory the symbolic link is pointing to, Tomcat 6 will see that it can no longer find the various applications I’ve deployed, and assume that it should undeploy them, thus deleting the configuration files. Damned if I know why they thought that was a good idea. Could they not have just printed out an error message and deactivated them or something?
I figure it’s a bit bloody silly, but there we go. For reference I’m using Tomcat 6.0.16. It’s also possible I’m doing something wrong, I suppose, and that I shouldn’t be placing the configuration files in the conf/Catalina/localhost/ directory, but there we go.