on Sun, Aug 05, 2001 at 08:16:08AM -0700, Shriram Shrikumar (prince_shri@yahoo.com) wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> It was pleasant afternoon when I realised that maybe, today would be
> a good day to move the /var partition just to / so I can use the
> extra space elsewhere and / had a couple of hundred megs not being
> used. I went into singe user mode and then,
>
> cd /
> mkdir var2
>
> cd /var
> mv * /var2
>
> after churning around for a while, it gave up and told me that there
> was no space. I gave up on moving var the var parition and before
> thinking gave
>
> cd /
> rm var2 -r
>
> Thus started my adventure into ext2 undeletion software.
<...>
> Any help appreciated.
I was once asked whether or not GNU/Linux had any features to prevent
users from doing bone-headed stupid things.
Yes, I said.
Bitter experience.
You've just learned something. Your data is, in all likelihood, gone.
You might get parts of it back, but a complete restore is very unlikely,
and will be quite time consuming.
- Buy yourself a backup system. I recommend DAT tape, CDR, or
alternate networked storage.
- Use it.
- Take appropriate measures before you do any serious mucking with
your partitions in the future.
E.g.: don't 'mv' data, copy it. This leaves you with two images of the
data, in the event one goes bad.
Your going to single-user mode was the one smart thing you'd done --
this minimizes any changes to data while you're working. Better yet,
boot a rescue system and mount the partitions you're doing surgery on
someplace outside the normal filesystem heirarchy.
My MO for any filesystem surgery is:
- Go single-user or boot a rescue system.
Do *both* the following:
- Create tape backups of data to be moved.
- Create filesystem backups (either locally, if space permits, or networked
to another station).
This provides redundant backups, and gives me one fast method for
restoring data (the filesystem backups).
- VERIFY YOUR BACKUPS. Missing, incomplete, or inaccurate backups
won't do much for you.
- *COPY* data from old to new locations. Various means work, I
prefer the older:
$ tar cvf - <old dir>/* | ( cd <new dir>; tar xvf - )
- *VERIFY* the move:
$ diff --recursive --brief <old-dir> <new-dir>
- Rename the old tree, and move the new tree to its location.
Change mount points if appropriate.
- Resume multi-user operation or reboot system. Sniff around. If
there are any problems, you've still got:
- A tape archive.
- A disk archive.
- The old disk tree.
- After a suitable test period (minutes, hours, days, your option),
go ahead and recycle your old bytes by nuking the old directory.
Yes, as a general consequence, repartitioning is a somewhat
time-consuming operation. This is one of the reasons I try to shoot for
a good, long-lived partitioning schema on my boxen.
For general backup suggestions:
http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/backups.html
Partitioning suggestions:
http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/partition.html
Cheers.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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