Lost Documents and Photos and desktop files and folders

[Chris Mohler]

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 5:42 PM, Roger Benham <rogerbenham2000 at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> Well it can hardly get worse. I downloaded the .iso, burned a CD of 8.10
>
> I installed 8.10 following instructions (I thought).
>
> So now I have 8.10 installed but everything that I had in 8.04 has
> disappeared. All my desktop documents and folders, all my home folder items
> such as photographs, pictures, documents.
>
> The disadvantage of digital photos as 14 months worth were in there
> including those of my wife. I am a selling photographer (not a geek).
>
> Is there any way I can recover what I lost?

Hi Roger,

If you did a clean install of 8.10 (and performed the step warning you
that "All data on your drive will be lost!", then things are looking
bleak ;(

Hindsight is 20/20 of course - but if you have any sort of electronic
data that you need to keep, you should regularly back up to DVD and a
backup hard drive.  Often we tend to learn this lesson the hard way :(

All that being said, if you are up for some serious forensics, it
might be possible to recover some of your files.  I have not done this
in a while, but the general process is this:

1. Do not keep using your hard drive to boot - the longer you do so,
the more of the old files are overwritten!

2. Boot from a live CD (the 8.10 disk should work OK - select  "Try
without installing")

3. Mount your hard drive that contained your photos (might be as easy
as right-clicking the volume shown on the desktop, but don't recall)

4. Use a program such as foremost to recover files.  Depending on size
of disk, speed of your PC, etc - this process will likely take quite
some time.  See this article (particularly update 2) for an example of
running foremost:
http://www.ubuntu-unleashed.com/2008/04/howtorecover-and-undelete-text-file-in.html
 There's also a bit of chicken-and-egg to watch out for here.  Do NOT
recover the files back onto your original drive - doing so will
overwrite files that have yet to be recovered!  The ideal scenario is
to use something like an external HD to recover to.

I realize this is just a rough outline, and if you want further
explanation on any of those steps, don't hesitate to ask - there are
others on the list who are far more knowledgeable than I.

Good Luck!

Chris