> Please try http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
> and post the details.
Thank you. I did download Testdisk but was not sure whether I should use it. I
did use it after you recommended it and it worked like a charm. Its absolutely
fantastic. It showed me all previously deleted partitions, the folders and
files. It offered to copy them and as I am typing this, it is copying files
from the depeted partition to my external harddisk.
It must have saved me at least Rs. 5k in charges and a lot of headache. I can't
praise this software enough.
Mohan suggested Photorec. It is a part of Testdisk download package. I havn't
tried it out but will do it today.
For referrence, I will explain how the backups/restore failed -- this should
prevent others from making the same mistake.
1. I use the tool 'Simple Backup and restore' in Ubuntu.
2. I had configured it to store the backup files into an external hard drive.
3. I took a backup (almost a year back) and tested it by restoring from the
backup and everything worked fine.
4. I have been backing up regularly at least once a fortnight. I look at the
processes to verify and have noticed that the tar and gz processes run as
expected.
4. I also took a backup just before formatting.
5. After formatting, when I tried recovering, I realised that the last backup
in the hard drive was about 3-4 months back.
So what happened to all the backup files ???? I think I solved the mystery
......Read on to know.
1. My external drive is named "KC" and when mounted is accessible via
"/media/KC"
1.1 I configured 'Simple Backup and restore' to backup to "/media/KC".
2. About 3-4 months, back, I clicked on backup without noticing that my
external drive was not attached.
2.1 Half way thorough the backup, I realised it, aborted the backup, attached
the external drive and started the backup again.
3. The 'Simple Backup and restore' tool did a very stupid thing. When the
external drive was not attached, it went ahead an created a directory called
"KC" in "/media".
4. So, when I attached the external drive, Ubuntu mounted it to "/media/_KC" -
notice the underscore in "_KC".
5. Since 'Simple Backup and restore' was configured to use "/media/KC", it
happily backed up everything to my laptop harddrive and not my external drive.
6. When I formatted my harddrive, I lost all backups in "/media/KC".
7. I should have done a simple copy/paste of the important folders from hard
disk to external drive but my supreme stupidity made me decide against it and I
paid the price.
Please be very careful when taking backups and do try a restore at least once a
month. These kind of stupid problems can be easily detected and corrected by
doing a test restore to a different PC or distro every month or so. I had
Fedora on a separate partition. If I had tried a restore in Fedora, I would
have found this error during the restore. (Don't try on the same
machine/partition as it will restore perfectly.)
Hope people learn from my mistakes and don't have to face the sinking feeling
when I realised that I lost almost 3-4 months of very valuable data.
Thanks again to Ravi and Mohan.
There are a couple of other tools too but will try very hard not to be in
another situation where I have to recover from formatted hard drive.
Regards,
kc
K. C. Ramakrishna
www.rknowsys.com
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