Recovery Underway

Well, its looking like I didn't lose nearly as much as I had feared in the NTFS->VFAT copy debacle of a few weeks ago. As far as I can tell so far (and I hope I don't jinx things by saying this) all that I lost was a decimated image of my 200GB filesystem from my previous computer. I've spent most of the year going through said image and either copying out files that I want to keep, or (more often) deleting files that I had no use for anymore.  I won't like having lost all that work, but if its all that was affected I won't have lost any files since I still have the 200GB drive that I imaged, so I could start over. Not sure if I should bother though. I really had pretty much finished sorting through that old filesystem and I doubt there was much left there that I really wanted.

Right now I'm copying all surviving files off of the NTFS volume to my new 1TB drive, after which I will do a verification pass, just to be sure. Then I'll do an undelete pass. I already know there's about 2000 recoverable files on that drive, but all of the filenames have been lost. THAT is going to be fun to sort through. I guess the best thing to do will be to run an MD5 or SHA128 over the files and then see if any of the files I've recovered match. Its likely that many do. There's probably even a Linux duplicate-finder program that does just that, so I won't have to roll my own. I should go check and see.

Eeeexcellent -- My Fiendish Plan is Working!

Y'all must be tired of reading about my struggles with Hard Drives lately, but since that's all I've been doing all week, that's pretty much all I have to write about.

Things have been going quite well today. The exhaustive tests of the hard drive I've been doing for the last 5 days came out flawlessly so it looks like I've got another 80 Gig of storage. I've already put it to use as a buffer for helping me move all this stuff around as I perform various recovery and reorganizing tasks.

Now that the MythTv box is no longer doing disk tests I've gone and swapped the 8GB drive it had for a 20GB and, modulo a few reboots to try different drive jumpers, its all working fine. Right now its continuing the MythTV install that it aborted due to lack of space several days ago. Once that program is installed, I'll see if I can get an X session to run so I can boot into Gnome. After that, I fear it may be repurposed to do disk tests again.

The 500GB drive that I imaged (and from which image I am recovering mucho files, even as I type) seems to have some bad sectors. I knew that after the first time I imaged it. However this time it seemed to have more. This is not a good sign. So, its going under the old reconditioning regime and it will afterwards either report a flawlessly working drive, or it its getting replaced since its still under warantee.

Once I have a trustable 500GB backup drive again it will be time to bite the bullet and erase the 200GB system image backup from over a year ago, which has been my backup-backup through all of this. I will then use that drive to *downgrade* my current system from 500GB to 200GB, freeing up another 500GB drive. This seems reasonable as most of the spare space on my machine is being used for storage and once I have a MythTV/storage server, that should not be an issue.

Then the 2x500GB and 1x1TB drives will all get stuck into the MythTV box to supplement the puny 20GB system drive it has, and I will be the proud owner of a 2TB storage thingee.  I'm not going to go with any raid redundancy or anything at first (although I will probably merge the drives into a single 2TB filesystem via raid or LVM2) as my experiences on my web server is that the raid software crashes more often than the hard drives its meant to protect.  At some point I WILL want to come up with a reasonable backup solution, like a removable 2TB drive or something, but that can wait for a future upgrade plan.

Its a Good Feeling.

I feel like I've put in a full days work and that I can relax without feeling guilty. Todays file recovery program has gone swimmingly, and I have to admit that I'm beginning to think that my data 'loss' was all pilot error. You see, I've been doing some spot checking and it looks like all of the empty directories that Thunar created were in anticipation of moving files over. First it creates the directory skeleton, then it moves the files (which is a weird thing to do if someone might interrupt the process -- like I did -- but that's beside the point).

The reason that I couldn't find the source files that I had been moving is, I think, because I managed to fumble and drop them into another directory while I was working. So, all my panic over the last couple of weeks about VFAT file systems silently failing to correctly move files may have all been in my head. Certainly now that I'm doing a full search of the 'erased' drive, I'm finding all of my 'missing' source files, although they're in some pretty peculiar places.

So, in the end I'm not sure if I've lost any files at all. Certainly I've got a bunch of directories that desperately need unscrambling, but every time I look for something that I was sure was lost, I find it somewhere. I may not be happy at myself for blowing things out of proportion in a moment of panic, but I can't say I'm sad to be wrong about a major data lossage event. I'm also pleased with myself that I'm big enough to say publicly that I was wrong, and that all of my recent disk problems are probably my own damn fault.

And if nothing else, I now have far more familiarity with Linux's forensic and data recovery tools, which I must say are FAR superior to those that exist for Windows.