recovering deleted files

[rikona]

Hello Amichai,

Monday, March 11, 2013, 12:38:14 AM, Amichai wrote:

> 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've lost disks before, so I have that experience. :-( This was caused
by a circular link pattern which made things look different from what
they really were. What I learned was:

Be careful when deleting files if you have multiple-linked dirs -
things may not be the way they look! And don't shift-delete things
then either - trash can be your friend...

> 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 have a lot of data. Do they have something like rsync which can do
smart, small-data-transfer updates?

The other thing I learned:

Even if you are incredibly busy, you still have to take a bit of time
to do frequent backups, even if you have to lose sleep to do so!
That's what I didn't do...

> 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.

Agreed. I used to do that always with Windows, and will take it up
again...

> 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.

Actually, my first priority was to stop any writes ASAP. And, yes, I
am using 2 dd copies now for the recovery attempts.

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

Yes, that is what I used.

> 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.

That comp is ext3.

> Good Luck!

Thanks! It looks like I will need it. :-) And many thanks for the
info!

-- 

 rikona