I Just Screwed Up....Any Way To Recover?

[soundchaser59]

OK.......I didn't know about "persistence" on this usb thumb drive iso I've been running as a test. I assume not knowing about persistence is the cause of my screw up....

I was running Linux Mint from my usb thumb drive. I created a folder and I copied moved another folder of backed up files from the Windows hdd to the new folder on the thumb drive.

Restart and now the folder I created and the folder I moved are gone. no where to be found.....

How do I get it back? Let me guess......I can't?

[GreyGeek]

Did you umount the thumb drive before you restarted? That's to make sure the cache is flushed to the drive. Or, before you rebooted, you could have issued a couple of "sync" commands to " Synchronize cached writes to persistent storage" (from "man sync"). Recover? If the folder and its files weren't flushed then it is doubtful. Generally a USB stick to be made into a LiveUSB with persistent storage uses the FAT32 as the format to allow Windows to write to the persistent part.

EDIT: Once when I was coding for a client (IBM PC with a 5.25" floppy drive, using the Turbo Pascal 3.02A language) I programmed late into the early morning hours, 3:30AM, as my custom was. (Visit clients during the day, program at night). My development took place on one floppy and I'd back up to another. I slammed several floppies into the second drive looking for one I could reformat and use to back up the first floppy. I found one and quickly issued "format a:". The instant I hit the Return key I realized I had used the wrong disk designation. An entire nights work, 7-8 hours worth, wiped out in an instant.

My wife woke up hearing me scream through three doors and a 50 foot hallway. Mother nature, she gives you the test first, and then the lesson.

[soundchaser59]

Did you umount the thumb drive before you restarted? That's to make sure the cache is flushed to the drive. Or, before you rebooted, you could have issued a couple of "sync" commands to " Synchronize cached writes to persistent storage" (from "man sync"). Recover? If the folder and its files weren't flushed then it is doubtful. Generally a USB stick to be made into a LiveUSB with persistent storage uses the FAT32 as the format to allow Windows to write to the persistent part.

I'm too "green" to know about any of that stuff.......it's gone.

I had no idea the folder I moved would simply disappear...... WOW!

[Rod J]

I was going to suggest trying TestDisk and PhotoRec but as the data was placed in a persistence file I'm not sure it would work. It might work if you booted off the USB install and installed TestDisk (which includes the PhotoRec recovery app) and ran PhotoRec on the persistence file or the unused part of the USB device. PhotoRec can search for different types of files if you specify what sort of files you're looking for.

[Qqmike]

Both good suggestions:
sync-ing, or safely removing;
PhotoRec/TestDisk

And a comment ... I haven't played with live w/persistence for a long while, used to do a lot of it, we used to build them manually (using commands), and through the years, there have been various canned programs for building live w/persistence. IMExperience, I've seen many examples and cases where after "building" a persistence, it simply didn't work! And often, we couldn't figure out why.

[GreyGeek]

A daughter of a friend, less than a month before her graduation from college, had to turn in a major paper she had written. While she was finishing it up her computer crashed (WinXP) and when she rebooted WinXP couldn't see her HD again. I mounted her HD in an external carriage and used dd to create an image of the HD on my HD. I used PhotoRec to scan it for the 1,500+ photos she said was on the HD, AND a auto bkup of her paper, which had most of the changes she had made the day of the crash. PhotoRec recovered 1,492 of her photos and her paper. About 15-20 were not recoverable. I had started the scan at 1 PM and when I got up the next day it was done. The final time stamp revealed it had run for 15 hours, IIRC. She got her paper in on time and graduated with a degree in Forestry Management. She spent her next summer as an intern in Wyoming.

[Snowhog]

What the OP hasn't made clear, is if he actaully created a persistent USB installation. If he did not, nothing done during the running of the OS is going to survive a reboot. If he did, but the persistence partition isn't functioning correctly, well, same end result.

Forcing the write cache/buffer to be flushed (written to disk) is extremely important when writing to a removable media. Because of this, it's very important to 'eject' removable media, and having done so, wait until the system reports that it is safe to remove the device. That ensures that any pending writes of cached/buffered data actually gets written to the device before it is removed.

A hard lesson to learn "the hard way", but we all (mostly) have experienced this at some point in our adventure using Linux.

[Qqmike]

Snowhog: What the OP hasn't made clear, is if he actaully created a persistent USB installation.

Yeah. For the record, that's what I question, too, but jumped on-board the assumption that he did create it

[GreyGeek]

soundchaser59:

OK.......I didn't know about "persistence" on this usb thumb drive iso I've been running as a test. I assume not knowing about persistence is the cause of my screw up....

Since English is still my mother tongue I translate that as meaning that the usb thumb drive DID have persistence on it.

[soundchaser59]

Since English is still my mother tongue I translate that as meaning that the usb thumb drive DID have persistence on it.

Well, three geeks can't be too far off base, so it must be my writing that was confusing.

When I said in my OP

.I didn't know about "persistence" on this usb thumb drive iso I've been running as a test. I assume not knowing about persistence is the cause of my screw up....

That was after I had already done some googling to try and understand why my folder disappeared. I gathered from my panic readings that I should have done some kind of "persistence" thing. So my original statement was meant to convey that I did not know about persistence before I moved my folder to the usb stick, and not knowing about the need for persistence is what caused me to unwittingly lose my folder into cyber oblivion. I had no idea that I needed to tell it to use persistence.

My rust is showing. (I'm older than I look or talk) I never thought about the idea that the OS might be loading from the usb stick and actually running in memory. But that explains why the OS would not recognize the free space on the usb stick......the machine only has 2GB of ram in it, the iso is 1.4GB maybe, and that is why it said I only had 600MB of free space to move files. If all of that is correct, then it makes perfect sense that anything I moved to memory would disappear as soon as I restart the machine. I had no clue that it wasn't actually writing my folder to the usb stick. Which explains why photorec can't find anything on the stick to recover.

The bad part is I lost a 500MB folder that had bookmarks, music files, video clips, docs, spreadsheets, pictures.

The good news is that all of the other stuff I need to preserve is in a different folder that is still on the Windows hdd. That is about 40-50GB of stuff. Losing that would have really pissed me off, to the point of actually cussing out loud in Klingon and Romulan and maybe even Cardassian.

[Snowhog]

The good news is that all of the other stuff I need to preserve is in a different folder that is still on the Windows hdd. That is about 40-50GB of stuff. Losing that would have really pissed me off, to the point of actually cussing out loud in Klingon and Romulan and maybe even Cardassian.

You have a sense of humor. That's good. It is to bad that you lost what you did, but as you point out, it could have been worse! As I said, it's a hard lesson to learn the hard way.

[soundchaser59]

You have a sense of humor. That's good. It is to bad that you lost what you did, but as you point out, it could have been worse! As I said, it's a hard lesson to learn the hard way.

And it's the kind of class I only have to take once.

[GreyGeek]

Until you get older, and your memory isn't what it used to be!

[soundchaser59]

Until you get older, and your memory isn't what it used to be!

I prefer the term "less young."

[GreyGeek]

Huh? What were we talking about? I forgot!