# Persistence issue with CircleCI

**URL:** <https://discuss.circleci.com/t/persistence-issue-with-circleci/40791>\
**Category:** Build Environment\
**Tags:** circle-yml\
**Created:** [July 30, 2021, 11:56am UTC](https://discuss.circleci.com/t/persistence-issue-with-circleci/40791 "2021-07-30T11:56:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Cham](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@Cham](https://discuss.circleci.com/u/Cham)\
**Post date:** [July 30, 2021, 11:56am UTC](https://discuss.circleci.com/t/persistence-issue-with-circleci/40791/1 "2021-07-30T11:56:39Z")

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We have had an orb that exists for a long time; we decided to use the same orb in a new project.

The part below stopped working for no reason

> - persist\_to\_workspace:  
> paths:  
> - .  
> root: .

The error we get is  
**The specified paths did not match any files in /home/circleci/project**

How can we debug it? It looks so wrong, especially previously it worked.

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**Author:** ![timvisher](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/circleci/user_avatar/discuss.circleci.com/timvisher/32/27678_2.png) [@timvisher](https://discuss.circleci.com/u/timvisher)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2021, 6:28pm UTC](https://discuss.circleci.com/t/persistence-issue-with-circleci/40791/2 "2021-08-02T18:28:29Z")

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> [@Cham](#):
>
> The error we get is  
> **The specified paths did not match any files in /home/circleci/project**

I would bet that one of the following things is going on:

1. You’re not calling `checkout` before this step, thus `/home/circleci/project` is empty.
2. You’re calling checkout but it’s a new git repo and so the directory is empty somehow (this feels less likely).

To debug it I would probably explode the orb into your project, get it to run up to the persist to workspace step, and then either ssh in and see what there is to see or simply add a `run: ls -lA` or similar.

Hope that helps!

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**Author:** ![Cham](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@Cham](https://discuss.circleci.com/u/Cham)\
**Post date:** [August 3, 2021, 3:52pm UTC](https://discuss.circleci.com/t/persistence-issue-with-circleci/40791/3 "2021-08-03T15:52:41Z")

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@timvisher It came out that in the config.yml, I had a weird new line sign, so I persisted not into . (dot folder) but into (dot plus newline char) folder. The second naturally didn’t exist.