Christian Rene Thelen posted on Sun, 13 Aug 2017 19:12:48 +0200 as excerpted:
> I have formated an encrypted disk, containing a LVM with a btrfs system. > > All superblocks appear to be destroyed; the btrfs-progs tools can't find > the root tree anymore and scalpel, binwalk, foremost & co return only > scrap. The filesystem was on an ssd and mounted with -o compression=lzo. > > How screwed am I? Any chances to recover some files? Is there a > plausible way to rebuild the superblock manually? Checking the raw image > with xxd gives me not a single readable word. > > I managed to decrypt the LV and dd it to an image. What can I do? Sysadmin's rule #1 of backups: The value of your data is not defined by arbitrary claims, but by the number of backups you consider it worth the trouble to make. No backups, you defined the data as worth less to you than the trouble and resources it would take to make them, and unlike words, actions, or lack thereof, are facts that don't lie. So regardless, you're not screwed, because if you had backups you can always recover from them, and if you didn't, then you considered the time and trouble to make backups worth more than the data itself, so in either case, you saved what your actions defined as of most importance to you, and actions don't lie. It sounds like you can be happy that you saved the real important time and resources you would have otherwise put into making those backups, which means you can be happy, because the data was self-evidently worth less to you than the time and resources you saved. =:^) Meanwhile/alternatively, because I've learned the value of my data as defined by backups too... Consider the lesson of Hurricane Katrina. During the hurricane and the immediate aftermath, Intercosmos/drectNIC (a hosting company located in New Orleans) had a small team that stayed on- site, keeping the servers up and the data available, and blogging about their experience. Many sysadmins and other technically inclined users were glued to that blog, living for each update. I was certainly among them. (2005) https://www.feld.com/archives/2005/09/blogging-from-a-new-orleans-data-center.html But at the same time I was seeing the wider news out of New Orleans. The looting. The people who /thought/ they were safe on that bridge, only to be slain by the police that were /supposed/ to be protecting them. The aftermath with the raw sewage, and bloated and decaying animal and occasional human bodies floating by. Of course that got me thinking about /real/ tragedy. I am (If you are) still relatively healthy, have a home to go to at night, food on the table, in the fridge, or money to buy it at the burger/taco/sandwich shop down the street, and a family and/or friends likewise fortunate, you have the /truly/ important stuff, and with a bit of perspective, the triviality of loss of some data in the bigger picture can be seen. Even if that data was irreplaceable family photos, consider how much more fortunate you are than the folks who just lost all that and more to a fire or flood... or as refugees just robbed of the last /truly/ valuable thing they had other than life itself, their family, or part of it, washed overboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Alan_Kurdi (2015) And if your lack of backups defined the data as trivial and you now regret it, well... be glad you'll live another day and get the chance to create more... this time, defining the data as more valuable than what you lost, by having more and/or more frequently updated backups thereof. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
