Rob has acknowledged that there are some sync problems with beta8a (it appears that fsck isn't quite as robust in the latest release as it was). He said that they are working on pinning down the problem but that repeatedly trying to connect via emplode would eventually fix the problem. I tried that and it worked in the end.

The an other solution was using the developer image to run fsck manually (Rob advised that you contact empeg before attempting this).

The final solution was to downgrade to an earlier beta.

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