On Sep 17, 2005, at 5:41 AM, Brian McEwen wrote:
On Sep 15, 2005, at 4:25 PM, Bruce Johnson wrote:
You WIll do 'sudo rm -rf *' in the wrong directory and while you
will live to regret it, your data will not.
I know two sysadmins do did this, as root, in the root directory.
Not pretty. One managed to kill the process in time to save the
data directories.
rm just removes the inode information, right? The data is still
there; there are un*x tools to rebuild that; isn't there one built
for OS X?
All of them depend on the data being recognizable text so you can
fine the pieces and string them together.
This doesn't work so well for binary files. It'd be a little like
getting a bushel full of crosscut shredder output and trying to re-
assemble it into the original documents, except some pages are in
several languages you don't know, and others are bits of magnetic
strips.
There are programs for OS X that are supposed to help you recover
files, but I don't know how well they work with deliberately deleted
files. They may depend on the fact that the file system is actually
HFS; I'm not really sure at a lower level how the format ties in with
the unix inode file system.
(Believe me, I spent a weekend researching this issue when I thought
I'd lost my entire users directory in a seemingly catastrophically
failed Tiger upgrade.
It turns out my data was only misplaced, not erased, but the
available info on recovering lost data from Unix systems is pretty
universally bleak in outlook.
Recovering from rm -rf / that way is not practically possible...if
you could do it, it would take you less time to rewrite Unix, from
scratch.)
I also set up a serious backup plan after that! After all the EASIEST
file recovery is copying the data back from a backup...
I don't think I'm totally off base, but my unix skills are only
those that I've had to gain thru immediate need :) Last time I had
to hack my way thru a filesystem at low-level was in the time of
MFM drives.
Well, at that you've got more recent experience than I. My last
encounter with Doing It The Hard Way involved a sector editor and an
Apple Dos 3.3 disk where I accidentally overwrote a very long Apple
Basic program with a three line file.
--
Bruce Johnson
"No matter where you go, there you are", B. Banzai
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