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Re: Need help salvaging what I can from major disaster

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Kynn Jones a écrit :
> 
> It turns out that I backed up the hard disk (HD) to the external drive
> (XD) twice.  The first backup went well, as far as I can tell.  I
> spot-checked individual files, etc.  Everything looked normal.
> 
> This first backup would have sufficed, but after I had done it I came
> across the recommendation that a disk of that size (2TB) should be
> formatted for ext4, whereas I had originally formatted it for ext2.  I

Ext2 can handle 2 TB just fine.

> reformatted the disk for ext4 (fdisk + mkfs.ext4), and then repeated
> the backup.  This backup procedure was in the form of a shell script,
> that I had tested repeatedly.  I just re-ran it.  My memory is fuzzy
> on the subsequent details.  Since everything had gone so well up to
> that point, I probably did not check everything as obsessively as I
> had up to that point, but something must have gone very wrong.

Before reading your next post, I also thought that the backup disk was
not properly mounted after being reformatted. There should be some form
of size limit or quota on /media to warn against this kind of common
mistake.

> At any rate, at the moment, my only hopes are that
> 
>   1. something may be recoverable from the first backup in XD;
>   2. something may be recoverable from HD.
> 
> The second of these is (I think) less likely, because I changed the
> partition scheme for HD, going from a single partition, to separate
> partitions for /, /var, /tmp, and swap.  In contrast, XD has always
> consisted of a single partition.

Yes, but not for this reason. Creating partitions does very little
modification to a disk.
IMO there are two better reasons :
- There were much fewer overwrites to the XD (only filesystem metadata)
than the HD (complete system installation).
- Files on the XD were written in sequence and not modified, meaning
that they are less fragmented and easier to recover.

> Now I'm looking for some data recovery tool (preferably from Debian)
> that either is part of some bootable media, or that I can use from a
> USB stick after first booting from a Debian Live CD.

I would have suggested photorec but you already found out.

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Thread

Need help salvaging what I can from major disaster Kynn Jones <kynnjo@gmail.com> - 2016-03-13 01:20 +0100
  Re: Need help salvaging what I can from major disaster Kynn Jones <kynnjo@gmail.com> - 2016-03-13 02:10 +0100
    Re: Need help salvaging what I can from major disaster Kynn Jones <kynnjo@gmail.com> - 2016-03-13 05:00 +0100
      Re: Need help salvaging what I can from major disaster rlharris@oplink.net - 2016-03-13 06:00 +0100
    Re: Need help salvaging what I can from major disaster Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> - 2016-03-13 10:50 +0100
      Re: Need help salvaging what I can from major disaster Kynn Jones <kynnjo@gmail.com> - 2016-03-13 21:40 +0100
        Re: Need help salvaging what I can from major disaster Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> - 2016-03-14 20:50 +0100
          Re: Need help salvaging what I can from major disaster Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> - 2016-03-14 21:00 +0100
          Re: Need help salvaging what I can from major disaster Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> - 2016-03-14 21:00 +0100

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