Killed /home during install of another distro

[Jack Bowling]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 10:20:25AM +1000, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-07-30 at 02:19 +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > no way to boot and google the situation, I played Y, Y, Y to all
> > fsck's questions. Now, /home is empty. I do have a backup from 4 weeks
> > ago, as I backup the first of every month, but I have done quite a bit
> > of work this past month. I'm very interested in recovering the data.
> 
> You could try looking in /lost+found.
> 
> And start backing up every day. It's easy enough to attach a cheap USB
> drive and set up a cron job to just rsync /home to it every night. A
> simple script will cycle the target directories, and you can have a
> week's worth or even a month's worth on that disk, at very little cost
> in disk space due to the magic of rsync and hard links.
> 
> Modify these scripts appropriately for your needs (especially paths,
> DEST, SOURCES etc), put them into $DEST, and tell cron to run the "rb"
> script as often as you like. Note that the first run will take a while,
> as it has to copy everything. Subsequent runs will be MUCH faster, as
> only altered files will be copied, unaltered files will be hard-linked
> to.
> 
> These scripts assume a local copy, by the way. You could back up to a
> remote site pretty easily, but you need to set up a transport (like ssh)
> and I'm not sure if the hard-link idea would still work.
<snip>

These bash scripts are very nice. Thank you. There are many backup apps
out there. I use rsnapshot which is perl using rsync. And yes, I learned
the hard way to do daily backups as well.

Jack