From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Masover Subject: Re: recovering from "rm -rf" Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 19:06:16 -0500 Message-ID: <42F55078.2030204@slaphack.com> References: <42F3A08A.30102@planet.nl> <42F3A16D.6090306@namesys.com> <42F3C73B.9040808@slaphack.com> <42F3D760.7090008@slaphack.com> <42F3E7F1.1030205@slaphack.com> <42F3EF37.3090705@edsons.demon.nl> <42F3F4A4.2050505@slaphack.com> <42F468CD.9070709@namesys.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com In-Reply-To: <42F468CD.9070709@namesys.com> List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Hans Reiser Cc: Rudy Zijlstra , PFC , michael chang , reiserfs-list@namesys.com Hans Reiser wrote: > David Masover wrote: > > >> >>I'm not sure yet how much I'm willing to pay. If the Namesys people can >>help me out, there will certainly be a donation headed their way, >> > > Nah, for you it is no charge, you have done a lot for us. What exactly have I done? I haven't contributed a single line of code, just ranted on the mailing list for you. I appreciate it, but I think I will pay you anyway. $25 for a question very well answered, and my mother says she'll match it -- which is still nowhere near what I'd have had to pay to get the other hard drive repaired. Does that WorldPay link work? > Did you try > what Vitaly advised yet? Yes, it seems to have worked. I seem to have all my important files, except one album of music and the last few episodes of anime -- and I'm still going through lost+found. That's really not much of a loss. By the way, I also discovered a nice trick to avoid making a full disk backup. I had a 500 gig RAID array that I was trying to rescue, and the biggest spare disk I had available was 80 gigs. So, I used dm_snapshot to create a writable snapshot, using a loopback file on the 80 gig drive as the COW device. I did the fsck on the snapshot, then wrote the snapshot back to the original device (dd if=snapshot of=orig_device) once I was sure it worked. If it hadn't worked, I could have simply removed the snapshot (dmsetup remove snapshot). The COW file was a 60 gig sparse file that ended up using only 2 gigs or so on disk after the fsck. Be warned, though, that dm_snapshot isn't quite like LVM snapshots, and only LVM snapshots are documented, while only dm_snapshot will work for this. I had to read the source.