On 2020-05-02 at 08:32, Carl Fink wrote: > On 5/2/20 7:19 AM, The Wanderer wrote: > >> Manual recovery like this *can* be done, but I do not recommend >> embarking upon it without very strong reason. (In my case, I needed >> to fix the filenames and permissions of my entire /home partition >> anyway, and that includes irreplaceable data measuring in terabytes >> and dating in some cases as far back as the '90s. Proper external >> backup is now very much on my radar.) > > Why not just reinstall the OS and copy the /home/username files into > the new /home partition? Reinstalling Debian is extremely easy. For one thing, I have a fair few packages not necessarily installed along with the OS, as well as some programs manually compiled and installed et cetera; digging them all up and getting them back in place would be a pain in its own right. For another, I don't have the experience with reinstalling and not losing data that way in order to trust the result. I've historically always installed to new drives, and copied the data across from the old ones. In this case, I didn't have a system to put either the old or the new drives in with enough ports to hook all the drives up at once, and I didn't want to risk installing over top and losing the undamaged remnants of my system. For a third, I'd have had to fix the /home permissions and filenames regardless, because /home was on the same array as /var and had gone through the same ownership-and-permissions metadata-lossy filename-mangling recovery process. What I ended up doing might be argued not to have been the most objectively optimal option in hindsight, but it was what occurred to me as making sense at the time, and it did end up working - and thereby proving that (as I said) this type of recovery *can* be done, however much I don't recommend embarking upon it. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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