I'd say about 50% of the files had been deleted. I ended up using ext4magic to attempt a restore, but, I never got any more data restored that wasn't already in the partial backup. Note to self : if something like this happens again, *immediately* unplug drive, *don't* mount it again and then save the journal. Anyways, today, I recovered a huge amount of files from a dd image of the drive using photorec. The drive contained many old Windows and Linux system backups, disk images, journal notes, ideas, source code and my other irreplaceable items. What I really want to recover are all the ASCII text files which consist of my source code, journal entries, ideas etc. I'm hitting myself for not prefixing the contents of these types of files with some type of signature. As it is now, I have recovered about 100K+ ASCII text files, with seemingly random names. I first plan on removing any duplicates. But, I was wondering if there's any tool out there that can parse the text files and determine if each file is some configuration cruft that I don't need or is actually something that I want and is important. My guess is that without strong human-level AI, I'm going to have to do it manually :/
Since the data loss event, I'm hesitant to use "sudo rm -rf" anymore. Also, the man page for rm says :
Code: Select all
‘--preserve-root’
Fail upon any attempt to remove the root directory, ‘/’, when used
with the ‘--recursive’ option. This is the default behavior.
Any suggestions or help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
jdb2