[NEVER MIND] Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

[Snowhog]

Re: Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

My home partition was intact!! 8) I've copied it to my external USB HD.

Spoke to quickly.

Forgot about the hidden files/directories. And even the folders that I looked into and saw the contents, didn't all actually get copied, even though Dolphin showed me that they did. My Documents folder and my VMware folder containing my VM did get copied, and those two were the most important. So I have lost a lot, but not all. I'm back on LL 10.04, KDE 4.4.5 as I type this. I've still a lot of customization to re-create, and that will take time.

This is the worst disaster that I've experienced in my journey with Linux. And what makes it all the worse, is that I inflicted it on myself. :P

[Telengard]

Re: Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

And even the folders that I looked into and saw the contents, didn't all actually get copied, even though Dolphin showed me that they did.

Personally, I don't trust software quite so much when dealing with my only existing copy of important data. Especially with GUI programs, I like to make sure they did what I think they did.

At this point you've probably overwritten much of the data which could have been recovered from your drive, so that is out. You could still send it out to a forensic data recovery house, but they probably wouldn't be able to get much back for you and the cost would be steep.

If you think this experience has been painful then please get the backup religion. It is the only path to salvation.

[Telengard]

Re: Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

Reading about the way fsarchiver works, I think it may still be possible to restore many of your files from the fsarchives. I think GreyGeek was on to something too. Since no errors occurred during creation, and you later verified that the archives were intact, I think it is possible that the restore process is somehow bugged.

[vinnywright]

Re: Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

dont know if it will help but mabey just to retreve some data.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1381103

of corse it may refuse to extract in this case as well

VINNY

PS: so sorey this hapend to you my Kubuntu friend ........ .......... but I will remember your tragedey if I ever go to do something simaler I will make shure that I at least have my stuff backed up to somthing easaley readable.

[MoonRise]

Re: Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

Snowhog,

Man I hate hearing that. Hope the FSARCHIVER people can help! Been there on HD failures. I feel for you.

[Snowhog]

Re: Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

At this point you've probably overwritten much of the data which could have been recovered from your drive, so that is out. You could still send it out to a forensic data recovery house, but they probably wouldn't be able to get much back for you and the cost would be steep.

You are correct. Last night I reinstalled KK LL 10.04 build 17-Apr-2010 12:50
I didn't get to bed until after 4:00am. I've spent the last six+ hours this morning finishing up. Not all the way there, but 99+ percent. I lost my bookmarks and some of my pictures/wallpapers. None were important, so just an inconvenience to have lost them. My VMware Player VM files were intact. That was important - critical even. Reinstalled VMware Player 3.1.0 last night and set it up a few minutes ago. Fired it up and all was good. Quicken, which I use for my personal finances, is in this VM.

I'm having a small issue with Kontact. I've got Akonadi properly set up and configured per my HOWTO Configure KDE and Akonadi so it just works, but when I click on Summary, Kontact stops responding (it dies in fact). The PIM is still displayed, and if I click the x to close the window, a pop-up appears telling me that it died. Acknowledge that, and it closes and I can fire it back up again. Not sure what to make of that, but everything else about Kontact works fine.

If you think this experience has been painful then please get the backup religion. It is the only path to salvation.

Indeed. In fact, I believe I'll be heading out to the store to look at a new external USB storage HD for just that purpose. I really don't want to go through this again!!

[GreyGeek]

Re: Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

.....
Indeed. In fact, I believe I'll be heading out to the store to look at a new external USB storage HD for just that purpose. I really don't want to go through this again!!

I was given a Western Digital Passport 320GB USB HD that works very well.

By the way, I looked at Eagle City in Google. It has less than 200 people in it. If I were 40 years younger I'd move there to enjoy nature, hunting and fishing. Do you fish much in the Yukon river? I taught school in Clarks, NE for 10 years because I wanted to raise our kids up close to nature. Clarks was 420 then. Now it is less. We had a great time there.

How close is your nearest computer hardware store? Let me guess ... 85 miles or more to Dawson and its Walmart store?

[Snowhog]

Re: Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

By the way, I looked at Eagle City in Google.

Well, I live in Alaska, and the last I heard, it was still part of the United States, not Canada.

Wasilla, Alaska for the adventurous. Home of Sarah Palin, but please, don't hold that against me.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

I live in Google a lot these days! Seeing how Eagle is smaller than Clarks and is so isolated I was wondering where you'd "head out to the store" to get an HD? I did notice an airstrip just east of town and a lot of Alaskans fly. Do you?

Ya, I have a pin in Sarah Palin's house after I checked out where she lived and to see if I could see Russia from there! (Actually, SNL insinuated she said she could see Russia from her home, but what she actually said was "there are places in Alaska from which you can see Russia").
Anyway, if Sarah Palin is the answer then I don't understand the question. She's a nice lady and all, but she is not evil enough to run for a high gov office.

[Telengard]

Re: Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

She's a nice lady and all, but she is not evil enough to run for a high gov office.

Probably more true than most of us care to admit

[Snowhog]

Re: [NEVER MIND] Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

Purchased a 500GB Seagate Passport USB HD. It's a SATA HD with encryption 'hardware' built onto the enclosure SATA connector. But that encryption works with Windows and not with Linux ( ), so one just has to reformat the HD as ext3 (in my case) and voila, you have a nice large USB HD to work with.

I used Clonezilla to create a full HD backup of my laptop HD to the Seagate HD. I'll just use Clonezilla from now on.

[askrieger]

Re: [NEVER MIND] Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

Personally, I backup the old fashioned way: gzipped tar files! It's the only technique that I understand.

[Snowhog]

Re: [NEVER MIND] Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

I hear ya. There's a reason the 'tried-n-true' ways of old are still around.

How do you create a 'full-system' backup using your method?

[askrieger]

Re: [NEVER MIND] Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

I'm not sure how to answer that because I'm not sure how you define a full system backup. I have 3 computers. One runs the current release of Kubuntu; another runs the previous release, the third usually runs the LTS. Note that I'm too chicken to run development software.

Immediately before I do a distribution upgrade (i.e. every six months), I generate a pair of tarballs for each machine. These cover /home and /etc. The machine which is currently running the oldest version e.g. Jaunty will get a fresh install of Maverick, but it will get the /home tree that was previously on the Lucid box (assuming all goes well). The boxes that were running Karmic and Lucid will stay as is, but their files will be saved in case of emergency.

All three machines have their /home trees dumped as "tgz" files to a USB detachable drive every week (or so). I have two of those (one for each current machine). All three machines, have zip drives. All of the files in /home/* (including dotted directories and files) that have changed since the last backup (daily for the current machine, less often for the other two) are backed up to their zip drives before I go to bed. (i.e. when I finish this message ) This backup is usually pretty small. All of this action is done with very small shell scripts with very short names. (I may be the only person in the world who failed Personal Typing in high school.)

I sometimes wonder whether I am really backing up all of the things that I should as often as I should, or too often. Over the years I have had countless minor catastrophes, (Earlier today I lost my saved Amarok playlists while researching the answer to a query on this site. Don't ask!), but I can usually get back to speed in minutes or hours, so I suspect that I'm about even on time wasted vs. time saved, and my children could all trade invective with a marine drill sergeant, if necessary, based on what they heard growing up in this home. Someone, who's less of a klutz than I could be less diligent about backing up, but I can't.

[Snowhog]

Re: [NEVER MIND] Need immediate help with fsarchiver!

Thank you.

What I mean by a 'full-system backup' is one that allows me to 'restore' a complete, working OS onto another/replacement HD.