Re: Urgent XFS Recovery

[Axel Freyn <axel-freyn@gmx.de>]

Hi,
> 
> > So, the question is, how much is this data worth to you? If you made a
> > backup before you started playing with it, it might not be more than $500
> > for a data recovery company to get your stuff back. If you didn't make that
> > post 'oh shit' backup, your chance of recovering yourself went exponentially
> > down and the price of getting someone else to get your stuff went
> > exponentially up. If this is business, its possible your insurance might
> > cover some of the cost (donno).
> 
> Price is fine with me, the problem is that there is no such company I
> know of in Turkey. Any suggestions?
> 
> > If the data isn't worth money but you'd still like it back ...
> 
> The data is important for me and worths money.
Just an additional remark: with each time you mount the new partition
write-enabled, you decrease the probability to recover your data (as
you're going to change the contents of the disk more and more).
So: ONLY mount it read-only
and the safest thing would be to play only on a copy of the partition:

 - add another disk with more than 350GB free space (e.g. mounted to
   /mnt/)

 - copy your damaged partition there: (but verify twice that
   /mnt/partition.dd won't be generated on your destroyed partition :-))

   dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/partition.dd

 - remove /dev/sda from your system ...

then, "partition.dd" will be a 350GB file containing all data from your
original partition sda1. You can now try to recover data from this file
-- without risk to accidentally destroy your original partition.

In order to recover the data, you could have a look at the Debian
Forensics packages
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=forensics-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
however, I don't know which tools are available for XFS, I only tried it
for ext2/3 sometimes.


Axel