[ILUG] Someone made a booboo - Call for help

[Richard Eibrand]

On Fri, 2 Jan 2004 16:29:18 +0000, David Golden <david.golden at unison.ie> 
wrote:

> Still troubling him?  If he continued using the machine after the 
> incident, AFAIK there's very little chance of any of the undeletion 
> tools other people have pointed to working, I'm afraid.  One really 
> needs to stop, unmount the filesystem, and run the undeletion tool ASAP.

Yeah, I remembered that aspect from a previous from experience, so I 
instructed him to do diddly until I could get some help out to him (he's 
still on the bus).

Before the rest of this mail, thanks all for the suggestions. Colm, the 
problem with the 'recover' tool in this case, is that it only seems to 
work with Ext2, and not Ext3 (which is the default filesystem type for new 
Red Hat installations).

Saying that though, the link to the 'Recovering Links in Unix' 
http://recover.sourceforge.net/unix/ yielded a solution of sorts. Prior to 
following those instructions, I replicated the situation he got into. 
(i.e. used a old object file as the source file, specified the new object 
file as the actual source file).

using grep -a -A[Size before] -B[Size After] "text to search for" 
/dev/[device on which file was lost],

I was able to recover the original source code for my little helloworld.c 
prog. It recovered a lot of gunk as well, but a quick copy/paste/save/make 
backup, and my source was back ;-)

My friend is trying that as we speak, so hopefully he will have some 
success.

---
More about nedit...

> Re: nedit autobackup, which AFAIK defaults to on - did he really manually
> disable it? Silly.

The 'incremental backup' is on by default, but the actual 'Make Backup 
Copy' option is not ticked on (my version at least(5.3), [which on further 
inspection is an old version - must update]), and the 'Make Backup copy 
(again on my version) switches itself 'off' after a program restart (must 
really update now).

> Nedit defaults to keeping a backup in filename "~name.c"(yes the tilde 
> is at the other end of the name to emacs, e.g. say if the file is in 
> your home dir, you might use a silly looking  "~/\~name.c" to access it.)

I got him to check that, but to no avail.

> If nedit had a sh**fit it  might well be because the incrementally 
> updated backup that it keeps in ~name.c++ suddenly stopped corresponding 
> to
> name.c++ while it was running - e.g. if he ran the g++ command line in 
> another window.

I think it might have been something along those lines alright. Although, 
 from his description, it was all within the same command prompt window...

> http://www.nedit.org/help/recovery.shtml#Crash_Recovery
Will forward the link to him ;-)

> All in all though, it's the kind of mistake you make once and then stop
> making... Having said that, I'm a heretic that thinks that in this day 
> and age of absurdly huge harddrives typical linux distro filesystems 
> should think about built-in backup/versioning.

"I am interested in your ideas, is there a News Letter I could sign up 
for?" <Bad Homer Simpson paraphrase>

Again, thanks for the help and suggestions.

Regards,

R


-- 
------------------------------------
Richard Eibrand , Tourmakeady		
Co.Mayo, Ireland	

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