Ubuntu

Lost all data in my computer!

Asked by Haki

Please help. My wife and kids are ready to kill me. Seriously. I was using Ubuntu 9.04 just fine but decided to install the newer version 10.04. The installation went smoothly but after the restart NONE of our files were there. Everything - music, pictures, files, years of homework, work-related stuff. I tried a bunch of stuff to no avail. Is there not a simple way to get all this data back? Seems like every piece of advice I searched for is quite complicated and eventually didn't work. Any info would be greatly appreciated and possibly save my life. Thank you.

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Marc Stewart (marc.stewart) said : 		#1

From your description, I assume that you booted with a 10.04 disc and went through the installation procedure, rather than going through the Update Manager's "Upgrade" option. This is perfectly fine, so long as you've either:
a) already got a separate /home partition, and chose manual partitioning in the installation, so it wouldn't be formatted; or
b) backed up all your important data somewhere else, ready to be copied back after the installation.
I'm guessing that neither of these is true in your case.

While there are programs and even live CDs (e.g. System Rescue CD) that can be used to recover data, they become much less fruitful once new data is written to the disk. The installation procedure will likely have overwritten some of your data, and there's no guarantee that you'll be able to get anything else back either. By all means try, but be prepared for the worst.

Back when I only made infrequent backups, I had a hard drive fail on me, so I know what data loss is like. The lesson is to get another hard drive and make regular backups.

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delance (olivier-delance) said : 		#2

One desperate solution is to by an external disk, and with Gparted copy partition of internal disk to external disk (each time you use computer, you reduce probability to recover file). Then you have to search a Linux tool to undelete files, and use it on your copied partition.
From my side, I refreshed all my backups yesterday and have a dedicated partition for "/home" (belt and strap). But as I work in date computing, I have such habits.
After you made this copy, I could try to help you as I have some time this week.
N.B. To do the copy, boot on Ubuntu CD and choose "Try but don't install", then Administration->System->Gparted. Remove partition on external disk, select partition where were the data, Edit->Copy, then open external disk and Edit->Paste.

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