|
DMI News |
Previous Entry.. Next Entry.. What was once lost, has been regained
June 24, 2004 13:53 Some of you were there, and others have heard about the great HD crash of Feb 2003. It was a sorrowful time. We paniced, we cried. To put not too fine a point on it, it sucked ass. Of insignificant consequence, I lost 50 gigs of various media. Of more significant consequence, I lost the home directories of many people who used my server. However, the real tragedy was the loss of my home directory and the site itself. I was able to recover the site partially through a very old backup and google's cache, but all the dynamic code controlling it was gone, and therefore had to be rewritten from scratch. At this point, it's not terribly important to recover the code, as most of it has been rewritten, but there was content on the site itself that was gone forever. Until now. Back when it happened, I tried various schemes to see if I could recover anything from the disk. When most of my halfbaked ideas had failed, I decided to just run e2fsck on it just to see if it could make any sense of the mindless jumble. On the server at the time, it ran for 6 days, and then finally the computer crashed. I decided at that point to just give up and move on with my life. I saved the drive, figuring someday in the future I'd try again. I finally got around to it last night. Since I now have computers that are an order of magnitude faster, I plugged the drive in and ran e2fsck again. It ran all night. This morning, I noticed it had finished, seemingly successful. I mounted the partition. The directory was intact. I checked the lost+found directory. IT WAS ALL THERE!!! Of course, now it's just a matter of getting it off the drive and saved safely somewhere so I can sift through the rubble and see what I've got. I had long ago decided that i was gone forever, but now I've got a second chance to see what was really lost. I've already restored all the news that was missing from that period. I've got several other things in mind that need to be recovered and will do so over the next few days. If you lost a directory on here when it crashed, lemme know, it's likely that it has returned from the dead.
|