Lost Documents and Photos and desktop files and folders

[Gary Baribault]

I have /home on a different partition, and just migrated from OpenSuSE
to Intrepid,. but I took a complete backup of /home to a removable
device before the migration anyway .. If I hadn't Murphy would have
surely formatted it, but since I did, of course, Murphy let me off ..

Life is like that, you can be carefull all of your life, but the first
time you take a short cut, Murphy nails you!

Gary Baribault
Courriel: gary at baribault.net
GPG Key: 0x4346F013
GPG Fingerprint: BCE8 2E6B EB39 9B23 6904 1DF4 C4E6 2CF7 4346 F013




Steven Davies-Morris wrote:
> Chris Mohler wrote:
>   
>> 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
>>     
>
> I've not used Foremost but I have used Ontrack's tools under Windows
> to do pretty much the same thing -- in this case I'd go with "raw" as
> the partition type. Up front it probably looks right now to Roger like
> he's hit the iceberg. But as long as he doesn't panic, and nothing
> further is done to the drive in question, a great deal of that
> important "wiped" data will be recoverable to another hard drive or a
> removable drive.
>
> Reading the blurb at the provided link, it sounds like Foremost will
> get back whatever is there that hasn't been overwritten. I suggest
> downloading it onto some removable USB media that can then be mounted
> by the "live" bootable CD.
>
> Though the horse is out of the barn, for future reference this is
> exactly why having /home exist as a separate mountable partition (or
> even mountable partition on a different hard drive) is a very good idea.
>
> Finally, if this is all too overwhelming for Roger, if he is by some
> chance in Southern California (within a couple of hours drive, give or
> take) I'm willing to come to him with a machine, a big spare drive,
> and tools to help out in the spirit of been-there-blown-my-head-off.
>