recovering deleted files

[Amichai Rotman]

Ric,

I don't know where you stand with this by now, but if you've lost the files
(happens to the best among us, to me too...) you can use this case as a
learning experience.

I use Dropbox to sync my most important files. My main Data disk suddenly
failed (ticked for a day, then suddenly died - with all my data on it...
I re-installed the system (the / partition was also on that disk) and
restored all my important documents in a flash after installing and
configuring Dropbox. You can choose to use another such service. I just
find Dropbox to be the most hustle free and reliable.

I strongly recommend to use a separate partitions, or even disks, for Data
and System files. This way one can always re-install the system without
touvhing the important Data.

If you are unfortunate enough to repeat the mistake in the future, the
first thing to do is to use dd to copy the partition with the deleted files
to a backup and work with that copy.

You've probably read this, but this is a guide to undeleting files from
Linux partitions using TestDisk:

  http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk:_undelete_file_for_ext2

You can find guides to the other file systems at the same location too. I
mentioned ext2, since I understand you are running Linux and you didn't
mention the file system you were using.

Good Luck!

Amichai.



On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 4:08 AM, rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:

> I just did something stupid! I was cleaning up a very large number of
> what I thought were duplicate files and putting them where it made
> more sense. BUT - I had 2 folders in different parts of the tree with
> the same name. Under those 2 folders I had what i thought was a link
> to the other location. So, I had 2 folders and 2 links with the same
> name. As I was moving files, I noticed that a large number were
> reported as already being in the destination folder, and I thought
> they were duplicates - so I shift-deleted them [not to trash] as I
> usually do. Trash is empty.
>
> BUT it turns out I had set up circular links back to the same folder.
> This was the reason why there were so many apparent 'duplicates'
> reported - they were not really dupes because they were already there,
> so to speak. When I finally went to the folder to see the results of
> my extensive moves, the folder was essentially almost empty. I had
> just lost a huge number of extremely important files - months worth of
> work....
>
> So - what can be done to recover them. The comp is still on and I am
> not going to touch it, which might overwrite the deleted files. What
> can I do to get back these files?
>
> Thanks much, in advance...
>
>  rikona
>
>
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