How to recover my invaluable information?
As time passes on, we collect valuable information on our hard disk. What to do when we got a failing hard disk?. The right answer would be reach your last backup. Few people could be so lucky that the last backup covers all the info you need.
Also it is common having one large hard disk on the computer and no other storage capacity larger than that. If you are very lucky then you enjoy a mirror disk on your workstation. If you are less lucky then probably you are looking for a way to recover your last information. On this article we are going to talk about several options we have for getting your information back.
The case
We have a laptop with more than 5 years of serving us well, our user does not pay too much attention to the backups, our user last backup was six months ago.
Describing the problem Affected user: Mi machine does boot, also when I boot my machine from a live cd/usb i can not see my data partition12. Be quiet not all is lostDon't worry, keep quiet, we have more than one way for getting back our information, Don't be desperate.
What tools can we use?
In our case we have tried with Testdisk, TestDisk did not work for us, Tesdisk did not reach our partition.
What worked for us was ddrescue. But you should notice the process took a lot of time, on our 60 Gb partition it took almost 9 hours, that was almost all night long just to create the image.
Another tool that was very helpful was smartmontools. smartmontools inform us about the total time our failing disk have been working. Also We have read you can use it for monitoring your disk on a regular basis.
How I start to recover my data?
Follow those steps:
- sudo ddrescue /dev/sdc4 /media/exthdd/myimage/backup.img
- sudo fsck -y /media/exthdd/myimage/backup.img
- sudo mount /media/exthdd/myimage/backup.img /media/my-data
What is really important is the information
A common mistake is trying to recover the disk. You know a misconception from old timers who used to work with diskettes. Modern disks, the ones that have the S.M.A.R.T. capabilities those devices when writing fails they locate a health sector and write down there. Keep the focus on recovering the information, avoiding any major effort on the hard disk, once the disk fails the situation only worsens. Take in account ddrescue works on low level, so it works on all filesystems.
Before terminating our article We want to share a useful tip for making
regular backups organize your folders, keeping organized folders help a lot
for doing quickly a backup. Perhaps We should write something about it also.
External Links.
- how to recover data from a broken hard drive
- Recover Data Like a Forensics Expert Using an Ubuntu Live CD
1. Home partition is what really matters, if failure is on other partition our information is safe, just copy the information to other hard disk.
2. A live media is very useful on those cases. Not having it means carrying the disk to another machine.
Last change: 22.11.2011 20:03 |
