Lost 22GB of files in a fraction of a second

[ve2ebp]

Hello,

Tonight, I erased everything that was in my documents 22GB worth of stuff. I had previously copied all my files in the Dropbox folder and as I didn't want to keep any duplicates, I clicked on the link that referred to the documents folder! So I deleted my documents folder, not what I thought was the copy of documents in dropbox.

The folders were in there but whenever I clicked to open any of them, they were empty in the trash can. A guy on the chat told me to shut down my system which I did.

Later on, I was told that I should I kept my system up and running by doing a ls -a ./ or something like that but it's too late now. My system is off

I have dual boot. I have windows XP on a different partition.
I guess if I could find a Windows software that could read ext3 or ext4 partitions (I was using Kubuntu 10.04 I believe), I guess that would be the best way to go about it?

My system will not boot up on a USB key! Just CD.

I don't know much about these things but one would think that if I run the recovery software from XP, it would minimize the linux partition to be tampered with?

I also read about UbuntuRescueRemix1104.iso or testdisk...

Which do you think would be my best bet?

Thanks you all in advance,


Pete.

[ve2ebp]

I checked it from WinXP. The FS is ext4 and it looks like the kubuntu is on the same physical hard drive as my XP OS at 90% chance. I also have another ext4 partition on sdb but there is no swap partition on sdb so I figured sda is the right partition. More to come.

[ve2ebp]

Would it be safe to create image of those two drives using Norton Ghost 10 (from the WinXP side) so that when I attempt to recover the files, if something goes wrong, I will be able at least to restore the .ng files. I guess it cannot hurt, right?

[WasMeHere]

Hi ve2ebp,

It is not convenient, but it is possible to recover erased files as long as 'only' the address is deleted and the data is still sitting on the hard drive. Search in the Ubuntu Forums for similar threads, and browse the internet to find out what can be done and which tools are available!

Do you still have copies of your files in the dropbox folder, or any other backup? If not you have to be very careful so that nothing will be written to your disk because it might overwrite your file data, that you want to retrieve.

I suggest that you use a rescue live system. There are many of them, browse the internet and select one. Make a boot CD, boot from it and do the work. But first, read the relevant tutorials that you can find on the internet! Photorec might be the tool for you.

Good luck
Olle

[WasMeHere]

Would it be safe to create image of those two drives using Norton Ghost 10 (from the WinXP side) so that when I attempt to recover the files, if something goes wrong, I will be able at least to restore the .ng files. I guess it cannot hurt, right?

Yes an image is a good idea, or if you have a whole spare disk, a cloned copy.

[carranty]

Hi there,

I'm having trouble understanding exactly what's happened. Am I right in thinking you have deleted the ' my documents' folder from your windows partition whilst booted into kubuntu? If do how did you delete it, did you right click on the folder and choose delete, or did you use the rm command? if you didn't use rm, have a look on your windows partition for a folder called .Trash , the my documents folder might be in there. 22Gb is large though, so it may not have been sent to trash, but removed entirely.

Whether you rebooted or not probably didn't matter.

I don't follow why you need a windows program that reads ext3. However you deleted it, it was on you windows partition, which won't be ext3.

[ve2ebp]

Thanks for your replies!
Just found out that Norton Ghost won't image ext4. So I will try to take a snapshot using acronis this time.

How did it happen? Well, I'm mostly a Win user for the time being. But I like Ubuntu a lot. Learning curve is harder at 46!

Anyway what happened is that under *******, the dropbox folder is actually a folder (separate folder). In the Dolphin integration, I found out too late that the dropbox is just a link that points to the documents folder.

So when I had made sure that all my documents had been copied to the dropbox folder (so I thought, it was just a link pointing back to the original documents folder), I wanted to delete the originals because now I thought I had everything in dropbox.

Often times, I keep too many files and at the end, I forget what is what.. That makes backups of backups of backups that pile up....

So that's what happened! I should have noticed the little arrow that told me this was a link, not an actual folder. I thought it was weird but didn't get to think much of it.

When I went back to my dropbox (what I thought was a folder), found out at my dismay that everything was there too! Few minutes later, I realized my mistake.

Out of 22 GB, only 1/2 GB survived in Dropbox.

Very frustrating. These things always seem to happen at night. This experience has shaken my world. I had a lot of important files in there.

Yesterday I tried to copy to an external hard drive, of course it didn't work... So from worse to worse... Seems to be how it works.

[ve2ebp]

No Carranty. I deleted my folder from Kubuntu. It's just that I happen to have my Kubuntu system running in a dual band combination along with a WinXP system running both on sda

[ve2ebp]

Well, though I knew all this, in the panick mode, I started fooling around in the trash bin trying to get them back... and unfortunately permanently deleting stuff int here that I thought was not important. Then I invoked xchat. The guys reminded me to shut down which i did. I didn't even shut down, I dropped the power to the box, period. I hope it's not worse?

Anyway... Pretty sad.
I should have had a backup system installed on there.

Hi ve2ebp,

It is not convenient, but it is possible to recover erased files as long as 'only' the address is deleted and the data is still sitting on the hard drive. Search in the Ubuntu Forums for similar threads, and browse the internet to find out what can be done and which tools are available!

Do you still have copies of your files in the dropbox folder, or any other backup? If not you have to be very careful so that nothing will be written to your disk because it might overwrite your file data, that you want to retrieve.

I suggest that you use a rescue live system. There are many of them, browse the internet and select one. Make a boot CD, boot from it and do the work. But first, read the relevant tutorials that you can find on the internet! Photorec might be the tool for you.

Good luck
Olle

[javierrivera]

You should be able to undelete everything from the Dropbox web interface.

After that they will be synced back to every system that is linked to your account.