Updates: While trying to recover, I had another idea, if you remember, I theorised that "Simple backup and restore" created a directory in /media. Following up on that theory, I used testdisk to go to /media/KC in the old partition of my laptop harddisk and lo behold, the directory did exist and all my backups (almost 15 of them - I am a paranoid backer upper) were safely in that directory. !!! WIN !!! I recovered all my incremental backup files. I had my original full backup and hence have all my data back.
BTW, Ubuntu puts the underscore *after* the name. Since /media/KC" was created by "Simple backup", Ubuntu created the directory "/media/KC_" and not "/media/_KC" (i.e. the underscore is *after* "KC" and not before) as I wrongly reported in my earlier email. Moral of the story: 1. Take regular backups on external media like DVDs and keep testing restores once a month or so. 2. Keep thanking the selfless souls who write great software and release it under GPL 3. Make contributions to projects which save your life - either code, bug reports, testing, documentation or cash (I am donating $$ to testdisk!!) With this exercise, I have become pretty experienced in data recovery - I recovered a mysql DB after a bug dropped all tables in the DB in the production server. It was a new server and we still hadn't started automated backups on it. It is possible to recover the DB from just the ibdata files provided you have the schema and have some idea of the text content of the tables. I would also recommend Jaunty - Ubuntu 9.04 to all. It really is very good. Though I have been a lifelong RH/Fedora fan and use Fedora/CentOs on servers as well as my laptop, I started dual booting (actually quadraple booting - Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse and ...) Ubuntu since 7.10. With 9.04 I think I have migrated completely to Ubuntu on my laptop. I erased Fedora 10. I am very used to Fedora/Cent on servers mainly because I have been using it since 1999 and know it well - .profiles, .rc, service controls, init.d.....but for everyday office use - documents, scans, productivity...Ubuntu is really up there. In terms of usability for non-geeks, I think Ubuntu has finally beaten Windows. The usability is fantastic and desktop effects work without binary drivers. It is very close to Mac and should beat it too pretty soon. Thanks to all for reading my loooong emails and for pitching in with suggestions. kc K. C. Ramakrishna www.rknowsys.com _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email ilugc-requ...@ae.iitm.ac.in with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc