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Trying to recover files from "Deep Scan"

Posted: 11 Jul 2012, 19:33
by grammaton76
This started off as what I thought was a bug report, but now it's a feature request.

I've had a Xen server lose one of its VMs' disks, I'm doing a deep scan on the parent machine's LVM volume. There's been an unsuccessful attempt at recovering the meta data earlier, so I'm at the point where I'm just trying to locate the ext3 filesystem and extract the /var/lib/mysql directory from the machine.

The frustrating thing for me is not the fact that it takes my machine four or so hours to perform, but that it's SO EASY to accidentally hit "enter" on the partition list instead of "p" - and then you're stuck, you can't go back up to the partition list. Your only choice from that point forward is "quit" back to the main menu, losing ALL of your deep scan results and having to REPEAT the deep scan just to try to look at the next filesystem. I've lost days worth of working time just from having to wait for deep scan to complete (AGAIN) over this really, really horrible UI issue.

I'd be happiest if exiting the deep scan required a "Are you SURE?" confirmation. Heck, maybe only require it if the deep scan took more than a minute. But you shouldn't be able to lose four hours worth of deep scan just because you select a partition by pressing "enter" instead of "p".

One other option that'd be awesome would be if there were an option for deep scan to do just a little bit more checking on the filesystems it's listing. For most of the results Testdisk finds, when I hit 'p' on a partition it says "it's damaged" instead of giving me a file list. I would LOVE to have the option to hide all partitions in which no files are detected.

Anyway, if there's some option somewhere which I've been overlooking that would make it behave as I'd expect it to, please point me to it and I'll shut up. Thanks in advance for anything you can tell me!

Re: Trying to recover files from "Deep Scan"

Posted: 11 Jul 2012, 21:50
by grammaton76
Awesome news: I just got permission from my employer to go ahead and recompile a version optimized for this recovery. I'll certainly be willing to share my changes. Most of the changes will probably be useless for the general purpose tool, but if there's ever a "optimized to recover your lost VM's filesystem from a deep scan of a huge volume" fork, they'd probably find my changes useful.

Re: Trying to recover files from "Deep Scan"

Posted: 17 Apr 2013, 01:20
by bbmitch
Hi there - From your notes, I can see you have experience with xen and recovery with testdisk - I'm working on this now and could really use some advice if you have a few minutes to point me in the right direction I'd be very greatful.

I was searching for xen references prior to posting my own and found your message - hopefully you are still monitoring the account.

Please look at my other post / let me know if you can offer some advice? Thank you!