From owner-freebsd-fs Mon Apr 29 11: 1:21 2002
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Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 12:56:11 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Brandon D. Valentine" <bandix@geekpunk.net>
Subject: Re: newfs overwrite...
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To: Joshua Steele <jsteele@CodefusionIS.com>
Cc: Michael Sierchio <kudzu@tenebras.com>, freebsd-fs@freebsd.org
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On Mon, 29 Apr 2002, Joshua Steele wrote:
>Well..this was the backup/storage server. I contacted drivesavers, and
>its going to be about 7,000.00US to get it fixed by them...which is not an
>option because i do not have that much in resources to get the drive fixed
>(i am a small business)
ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS backup critical data to tape. Sorry to be so
harsh, but let this be a lesson to you. Recently my boss blew away a
fair bit of PHP coding with an unintentionally greedy rm command. He
would have felt awful except that 24 hours had elapsed since the file
was last modified and so my backup schedule (courtesy of amanda) had
already put the file onto a tape. It took a matter of minutes to
restore it, literally. $7k is an expensive lesson in the relative
unreliability of hard drives. For under $10k you can get a 19tape AIT-2
library from Overland Data w/ a full compliment of tapes. Amanda is
free software. Protect your data. If you can't afford the hardware up
front, there are online merchants who will help you finance it. The
investment pays off the minute something like this happens.
>Are there any other tools, etc. for freebsd that aide in rebuilding the fs
>table? Or am i basically not going to be able to repair the drive, and
>might as well move on and start salvaging what financial data i do have at
>the current time before the tax quarter is up....
I recently used gpart (ports/sysutils/gpart) to recover the partition
table on a botched WinXP system for a friend. I don't know if it can
actually recover data from a newfs'd filesystem. The system I used it
on had only had its partition table wiped. It's worth a try though. If
that doesn't work you might start reading fs(5) and friends and see if
you can't come up with something creative. The data is still there on
disk but since you newfs'd it you'll be without the inode-to-file
mapping that makes the data meaningful. My suggestion is, don't ever
mount that drive rw, only mount it read-only so you don't overwrite
what's hiding on the disk. The data is at least in some form
recoverable, it's just a matter of how much time and effort you need to
put into it. At a certain number of hours of work that $7k starts to
sound like a bargain.
Good luck!
Brandon D. Valentine
--
"Time to resign from the human race, wipe those tears
from your lovely face. Baby, wave to the man in the
ol' red caboose before all hell breaks loose."
- Kinky Friedman
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