I doubt if it will be helpful for Jarrod, but when I hear stories like this, I remember reading about a similar event and a remarkable partial recovery here: http://www.justpasha.org/folk/rm.html
<http://www.justpasha.org/folk/rm.html>Kevin On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 8:04 AM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwa...@me.com> wrote: > Jarrod, > > Noting your exchange with Martin, Martin brings up a point that certainly I > missed, which is that somehow the tilde ('~') character got into the chain > of events. As Martin noted, on Linuxen/Unixen (including OSX), the tilde, > when used in the context of file name globbing, refers to your home > directory. Thus, a command such as: > > ls ~ > > will list the files in your home directory. Similarly: > > rm ~ > > will remove the files there as well. If the -rf argument is added, then the > deletion becomes recursive through that directory tree, which appears to be > the case here. > > I am unclear, as Martin appears to be, as to the steps that caused this to > happen. That may yet be related in some fashion to Duncan's hypothesis. > > That being said, the use of the tilde character as a suffix to denote that > a file is a backup version, is not limited to Fedora or Linux, for that > matter. It is quite common for many text editors (eg. Emacs) to use this. As > a result, it is also common for many applications to ignore files that have > a tilde suffix. > > Based upon your follow up posts to the original thread, it would seem that > you do not have any backups. The default ext3 file system that is used on > modern Linuxen, by design, makes it a bit more difficult to recover deleted > files. This is due to the unlinking of file metadata at the file system data > structure level, as opposed to simply marking the file as deleted in the > directory structures, as happens on Windows. > > There is a utility called ext3undel ( > http://projects.izzysoft.de/trac/ext3undel), which is a wrapper of sorts > to other undelete utilities such as PhotoRec and foremost. I have not used > it/them, so cannot speak from personal experience. Thus it would be a good > idea to engage in some reviews of the documentation and perhaps other online > resources before proceeding. The other consideration is the Catch-22 of not > copying anything new to your existing HD, for fear of overwriting the lost > files with new data. So you would need to consider an approach of > downloading these utilities via another computer and then running them on > the computer in question from other media, such as a CD/DVD or USB HD. > > A more expensive option would be to use a professional data recovery > service, where you would have to consider the cost of recovery versus your > lost time. One option would be Kroll OnTrack UK ( > http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.co.uk/). I happen to live about a quarter > mile from their world HQ here in a suburb of Minneapolis. I have not used > them myself, but others that I know have, with good success. Again, this > comes at a potentially substantial monetary cost. > > The key is that if you have any hope to recover the deleted files, you not > copy anything new onto the hard drive in the mean time. Doing so will > decrease the possibility of file recovery to near 0. > > As Duncan noted, there is great empathy with your situation. We have all > gone through this at one time or another. In my case, it was perhaps 20+ > years ago, but as a result, I am quite anal retentive about having backups, > which I have done for some time on my systems, hourly. > > HTH, > > Marc Schwartz > > > On Jul 28, 2010, at 5:55 AM, Jarrod Hadfield wrote: > > > Hi Martin, > > > > I think this is the most likely reason given that the name in the > DESCRIPTION file does NOT have a version number. Even so, it is very easy to > misname a file and then delete it/change its name (as I've done here) and I > hope current versions of R would not cause this problem. Perhaps Fedora > should not use ~ as its back up file suffixes? > > > > Cheers, > > > > Jarrod > > > > > > On 28 Jul 2010, at 11:41, Martin Maechler wrote: > > > >>>>>>> Jarrod Hadfield <j.hadfi...@ed.ac.uk> > >>>>>>> on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:37:09 +0100 writes: > >> > >>> Hi, I ran R (version 2.9.0) CMD build under root in > >>> Fedora (9). When it tried to remove "junk files" it > >>> removed EVERYTHING in my local account! (See below). > >> > >>> Can anyone tell me what happened, > >> > >> the culprit may lay here: > >>>> * removing junk files > >>>> unlink MCMCglmm_2.05/R/ residuals.MCMCglmm.R > >>>> ~ > >> > >> where it seems that someone (you?) have added a newline > >> in the filname, so instead of > >> 'residuals.MCMCglmm.R~' > >> you got > >> > >> 'residuals.MCMCglmm.R > >> ~' > >> > >> and the unlink / rm command interpreted '~' as your home > >> directory. > >> > >> But I can hardly believe it. > >> This seems explanation seems a bit doubtful to me.. ... > >> > >>> and even more importantly if I can I restore what was lost. > >> > >> well, you just get it from the backup. You do daily backups, do > >> you? > >> > >> Regards, > >> Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich > >> > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > -- Kevin Wright [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
