Ubuntu

I have stupidly overwritten /home - and want some of it back.

Asked by Duncan Lithgow

I forgot that my Feisty install had a separate /home partition when I was installing Gutsy for a spin. So I let it start overwritting the partition for a new install. I didn't let it finish (for other reasons) so there's very little there.

I need to know how I can recover as much as possible. The damage is:

* home is ext3
* home was selected to be reformatted and used as '/' by a new install
* the new install transfered some files
* the new install did not finish, only one step beyond the partition section of the alternative CD
* the partition is fully readable (and presumably writable)

Should I start by making an image of the partition, will that have the same data on it?

Duncan

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Markus Thielmann (thielmann) said : 		#1

Thanks for your question.

I'm afraid you won't have any luck with that. Disaster recovery is a quite wide field, with very little chances of recovering formated (and maybe overwritten) data. You may pay thousands of euros to get a expert looking at it, and he might not give you a guarantee that he even can recover one file.

So you should invest the time in redoing the work spent on that files. And don't forget to *regularly* backup worthy data.

If you're still interested in trying to recover some of your data, have a look at http://www.newsforge.com/os/03/10/08/1416248.shtml?tid=23 as a short introduction.

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Best Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow) said : 		#2

I had misunderstood my own problem, actually the location of /home had just changed relative to my root partition. So all data is safe.

Before I found that I started a wikibook on Data Recovery which may help anyone who finds this entry.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Data_recovery