[ubuntu-uk] Deja-dup & [lucky] backup

[Grant Phillips-Sewell]

On 30 May 2013 16:01, SuperEngineer <boosys at gmail.com> wrote:

> Deja-dup saved my bacon.  It was however on a separate partition *not* a
> separate disk! What if the partition resize failed grotesquely enough to
> bork the disk?
>

Rarely have I seen software issues/blunders cause irrecoverable data loss.

If a partition resize borked and blew away the partition onto which DejaDup
was backing your data, then there are tools out there which can scan each
block/sector of your drive to find the remnants of previous partition
structures, optionally re-write your partition table back to what it found,
and then there are tools to recover filesystems after this. It can be a
long, drawn out process... or it can take 10 minutes, depending on the size
of the drive, the amount of data and the amount of destruction.

Certainly a few years ago a student of mine brought in his nearly full 1TB
external drive (1 parition, formatted as NTFS) which apparently no-longer
worked under Windows. He says his son had unplugged it part of the way
through copying files to it (dodgy copies of movies, in this case). It
turned out that somehow this had borked the partition table and two if the
NTFS allocation tables. The above process took about an hour but everything
came back up nicely with the exception of the single file that was being
written at the point of removal.

Grant.
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