Linux data-recovery tools

[Caine]

Ha, seriously? You're veeeeeeeeeeeery lucky; the worst case scenario is by far the more likely.

I know. I was counting on 99% data-loss. It might just turn out to be a 99% recovery.


You know, it was a rather frightening thought that a file system could suddenly become so utterly messed up that it would become totally unrecoverable (I still have no idea what happened or why). While it certainly is possible, I'm glad that it's a little more robust than this incident made me believe.


(By the way, 73% of all percentages are made up.)

 

[Blue Protoman]

I need to back up my stuff more often. Anyone know a reliable, cheap USB hard drive?

 

[Prometheus]

You get reliable or you get cheap. Pick one.

 

[Mr Rob]

I need to back up my stuff more often. Anyone know a reliable, cheap USB hard drive?

As long as you're not buying any off-brand stuff, it's usually fine. Usually the biggest issues are space and power (USB powered or external power).


I prefer getting big ol' Desktop drives and putting them into an external enclosure with their own power. I've had good luck with Western Digital so far. And of course you can always get two and backup the backup, then you're quite safe.

 

[Caine]

I usually stick to Western Digital disks for external storage as well. So far they've been quite reliable.


The main downside: the non-universal power adapters of those disks are driving me nuts.

 

[Alec]

I'd suggest you check the SMART anyway, as I posted earlier, just to know if it was some sort of unusual occurrence, or if the disk is about to die.


There are also some self-tests it can do, you can read that in the manpage.

 

[Mr Rob]

I'd suggest you check the SMART anyway, as I posted earlier, just to know if it was some sort of unusual occurrence, or if the disk is about to die.


There are also some self-tests it can do, you can read that in the manpage.

The SMART tests are rather interesting, though not always the perfect indicator of imminent failure. If you really want to geek out for an evening, here's a fascinating paper of drive failure results at Google and SMART data: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/disk_failures.pdf


As I understand it, there's a couple indicators that may indicate failure is in the nearish future, though it's far from a definitive test.

 

[DaMummy]

I need to back up my stuff more often. Anyone know a reliable, cheap USB hard drive?

PM me, i know a place with "AMAZING" discount. I don't think you realize how "AMAZING" of a discount I'm talking about


no, but seriously...stick around on irc, i can help you find something if you have your debit card stuff setup and can order online. i got my 2TB seagate external USB3 drive for $75 brand new, and this was like 6 months ago

 

[Blue Protoman]

I do, actually. I've been busy and haven't been able to hang out on IRC very often. You can always PM me if you find any "deals".


Boy, I can't wait until we can pirate tangible objects.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Don't forget to turn off HD cache when using journaling filesystems (ie almost all fs on Linux), as it can lead to data loss in case of system crash :


hdparm -W 0 /dev/sda

 

[Mr Rob]

Don't forget to turn off HD cache when using journaling filesystems (ie almost all fs on Linux), as it can lead to data loss in case of system crash :


hdparm -W 0 /dev/sda

Do you have a link to an article with more information on this? I'm a bit skeptical.