08-27-2003
Contrary to popular beleif it IS possible to recover lost files in Unix - well with a few caveats.....
FIRST STOP!!!! Dont run the machine anymore.
Turn it OFF.
If you need to work or correspond with people while you recover your files find another box to do it on.
As Oliie says the unlinked file area is now vunerable to being overwritten and losing the data foerever. The good news is that if you just deleted them they inodes are probably in an area that hasn't been reused yet.
Next step is to get the Coroners Toolkit.
If you have some space on the disk where your data was stored that isn't in a partition, make a new partition, install a minimal OS and compile the binary of CT for your hardware. Now move that binary to a removeable device and mount it on your damaged OS. FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS VERY CAREFULLY.
Its a long process, complicated and far too much to go into here. It involves icat, finding parts of the masterblock etc. Your best hope is that all the files were under one directory.
I did for someone a year or so back...with limited success I must admit. Its certainly less work than rewriting 2 years of code. You might be able to find a partial recovery, perhaps the last working source file or something.
Good Luck
Last edited by andyj; 08-27-2003 at 09:45 AM..
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lndir(1X) lndir(1X)
NAME
lndir - create a shadow directory of symbolic links to another directory tree
SYNOPSIS
lndir fromdir [todir]
DESCRIPTION
lndir makes a shadow copy todir of a directory tree fromdir, except that the shadow is not populated with real files but instead with sym-
bolic links pointing at the real files in the fromdir directory tree. This is usually useful for maintaining source code for different
machine architectures. You create a shadow directory containing links to the real source which you will have usually NFS mounted from a
machine of a different architecture, and then recompile it. The object files will be in the shadow directory, while the source files in
the shadow directory are just symlinks to the real files.
This has the advantage that if you update the source, you need not propagate the change to the other architectures by hand, since all
source in shadow directories are symlinks to the real thing: just cd to the shadow directory and recompile.
The todir argument is optional and defaults to the current directory. The fromdir argument may be relative (e.g., ../src) and is relative
to todir (not the current directory).
Note that RCS, SCCS, and CVS.adm directories are not shadowed.
Note also that if you add files, you must run lndir again. Deleting files is difficult because the symlinks will point to places that no
longer exist.
BUGS
The patch routine needs to be able to change the files. You should never run patch from a shadow directory.
Use a command like the following to clear out all files before you can relink (if the fromdir has been moved, for instance):
find todir -type l -print | xargs rm
The following command will find all files that are not directories:
find . ! -type d -print
lndir(1X)