Re: issues with storage media

Parted / gparted are useful tools. The live .iso is very useful if you have an unknown disk - you can boot into linux to examine disk formats. The crucial thing to know is that most partitions can be recovered with enough care.

USB keys - try and buy a known brand. Stick small labels on them. Know what you use them for. They will still fail sometimes - don't rely on them for longest term storage. Back up files you want to other media as well/

On Sat, Jul 25, 2020 at 5:59 PM Semih Ozlem <semihozlemlinuxuser@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi I ran into the following problems a few times.
As operating system I use debian 10 (.2 gnome) and ubuntu 18, 19, (recently 20).

Question 1 An external hard disk that I use (which is I think possibly failing) was formatted in NTFS. While I was working on a machine at the university where I used to work, all files disappeared, and reappeared and the format of the disk was changed to FAT or something like that. I have no idea why and how this happened. Does anyone have any clues

Question 2 I use usbs to store the files I work with. Quite a few times when working with linux systems, the usbs refused to mount, giving wrong fs type blaah blaah error. This was a usb that I used and stored files to working under linux, and I do not remember the exact format on the disk. I tried various programs to recover the files, and in some cases I was able to recover some in other cases I was not able to. Sometimes I was able to format the usb to be able to use it again, a few times I was unable to. What methods are available to recover data, and what to do when something like this happens.

Thank you in advance