[olug] lost partition table

[Mr Scsi]

>
> *I keep a separate physical drive (currently 1TB) in
> my machine that is partitioned to match or exceed the main drive
> (just /boot and / in my case).  RAID mirroring won't help you if the
> problem is user-induced, so I have a nightly cron job that mounts the
> backup drive, rsyncs the contents from the main drive, and unmounts
> the backup drive.  Before I do any significant upgrades, I comment out
> the cron job until I'm content that I haven't hosed anything.  If I
> do lose an entire drive, I can just boot off the backup disk.
>
>
> *


Almost exactly what this is, but its only an rsync of /home (I can reload
the system if it dies).

disk druid whacked sdc1 and recreated it as lvm PV, so I'm hopeful that the
ext3 file structure is still in there somewhere.




On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 3:00 PM, Obi-Wan <obiwan at jedi.com> wrote:

> > I ran an upgrade this weekend and have 3 drives. sda, sdb are / and
> /home.
> > sdc was reserved as a full copy of /home.
> >
> > Disk druid marked sdc as an unallocated lvm PV but never formated it,
> only
> > changed the partition table so I'm sure the data is still there.
>
> I can't help you with your current problem, but I can tell you what I do
> to get around it.  I keep a separate physical drive (currently 1TB) in
> my machine that is partitioned to match or exceed the main drive
> (just /boot and / in my case).  RAID mirroring won't help you if the
> problem is user-induced, so I have a nightly cron job that mounts the
> backup drive, rsyncs the contents from the main drive, and unmounts
> the backup drive.  Before I do any significant upgrades, I comment out
> the cron job until I'm content that I haven't hosed anything.  If I
> do lose an entire drive, I can just boot off the backup disk.
>
> This is better than a backup partition, because I can survive a drive
> failure.  This spring, I almost lost 7 years of photos when I forgot
> to comment out the cron job during major surgery that (I thought) torched
> my home directory from the main drive.  The script synced over an empty
> home directory, which deleted it from the backup drive.  I can't tell
> you (but probably don't have to) how sick I was when I realized what had
> happened.
>
> I do have a USB drive at work that acts as a third backup location.
> At the time, it was an NTFS drive on a windows box, which meant I still
> had all my data, but I lost all my permissions and time stamps.
>
> Fortunately, my home directory wasn't completely torched, and I was able
> to recover.  I made several changes after that:
>
> 1.  My off-site drive is now ext3 hanging off a linux box.
> 2.  My nightly cron job to sync the local backup drive no longer deletes
>        files, it only adds them.  The script takes an optional "--delete"
>        parameter that I run manually from time to time to clean out all
>        the old stuff when I know it's safe to do so.
> 3.  Just in case, I comment out the cron job before updates.
>
> For those of you that don't have a large amount of critical data, burning
> it to optical drives periodically and housing them in a different room
> (or better yet, a different neighborhood) is a better idea.  I have about
> 250 GB (yes, GB) of digital photos, so optical storage isn't an affordable
> option for me.  Maybe when BluRay burners come down...
>
> At least you only lost your partition table.  I know from my experience
> that it's impossible to recover files on ext3 once they've been deleted,
> since the journalling mechanism immediately overwrites vital info upon
> delete.
>
> --
> Ben "Obi-Wan" Hollingsworth                             obiwan at jedi.com
>   The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the
>     Giver of all good things, so if I stand, let me stand on the
>       promise that You will pull me through.  -- Rich Mullins
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