Apply head to wall repeatedly

[vostoklake]

So yesterday I noticed my Ubuntu Gutsy partition was getting a bit full. "No problem," I said, "I'll just extend it over the top of my old Ubuntu Dapper partition. I moved all my own files out of that partition ages ago."

Well, not in fact true. I only noticed after Thunderbird wouldn't work for me that my mailbox was still pointing via relative link to... the Ubuntu Dapper partition. Which I'd just removed. This is more than nine year's worth of emails we're talking about.

Result: the alternative was losing virtually all my electronic-based memories of my life since undergrad years, or spending mega-hours seeing how Ubuntu's data recovery programme works. The answer is: pretty well. In fact, too well. The problem now is to sift through a few G's worth of recovered txt files to see if any of them resemble my old emails. If I hadn't just discovered a disk-based search engine, I don't know what I would have done.

So... that's how I spent my weekend. Anyone got any tips?

Comments

[mainfisch.livejournal.com]

*shudder* What an annoying mishap. Of course you never made backups of your files, I assume...

Anyway, did the data recovery restore the directories on your old partition? If so, all the old Thunderbird mail data may reside in subdirectories under [/home]/your_user_name/Mail, hopefully not renamed to .txt files.

Btw., there should be a powerful command line disk searching tool that is called find. For example, find / -name "inbox" will seek for all files and directories in all mounted directories beginning from / (root directory) that are named "inbox" (a directory of this name may contain the inbox data of Thunderbird).

Well, probably I'm not telling you anything new. Good luck!

[laputain.livejournal.com]

The best recovery software I could find couldn't do anything for directories or filenames - just restore the partition itself and scoop out everyone on it in anonymous text files. If you know anything better that could restore directories and file names on an ext3 partition, I crave to here it.

Actually, it's not that bad - my emails from 1998-2005 are backed up on my Win98 partition, so that only means two years of my life down the drain, rather than nine, at worst.

[mainfisch.livejournal.com]

Theoretically, if a partition is "removed", it's type is set to none or unknown or some such, and it's size is set to zero. No data is actually removed before you reuse the partition, by creating a new file system and formatting it.

So, theoretically again, it would have been easy to restore your partition, by setting the type back to ext3 and the size to it's former value, then running a e2fsck -f and see what comes back. In the worst case this would do something similar to what your recovery program did (storing all stuff in txt format in a directory named ../lost+found), in the best case all would have been like it was before you removed the partition. Well, honestly I never applied this receipe, so I can't guarantee that it really works like described.

Unfortunately, now that you applied the recovery program, there is no way back... you got to live with your recovered anonymous text files.

[laputain.livejournal.com]

Ah-ha! That's where you're wrong. The recovery programme was extracting files to my Windows partition and not overwriting the resurrected partition - so when I tried e2fsck -f, it worked fine. Although as you foresaw, everything's in lost+found and the file names are now gone, the directory structure seems intact... so that may be an improvement, I don't know.