...look over your shoulder...

[AnotherFairportfan]

...'cos there's always something comin' after you...

Many years ago, i (and several of my friends) had a button that said "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are kludgy and will format your hard drive."

Over the years, as things got better, that wise saying had slowly faded from my consciousness.

Today i am hoping to recover from a real-life example.

And the sad thing is that the installer that trashed the drive i had all my music files on (safely backed up on another drive, though) and a number of other things (not backed up) on was the Ubuntu installer, which i have run several times installing various Ubuntu versions and derivatives (Xubuntu 14.04, in this case) and it had never done anything untoward, so i was caught unaware.

Right now i'm running MiniTool Partition Recovery in hopes it can be reclaimed more-or-less completely.

It looks as if the full scan is gonna take another eleven hours, at the end of which it may very well tell me "Sorry, Melvin - you are S.O.L." and giggle maniacally.

Musical accompaniment for these agonised paragraphs: "Look Over Your Shoulder", by Alan Price from the O Lucky Man soundtrack.

[Atomic]

Blessed are the pessimists, for they shall have made backups.

[Grantwhy]

Blessed are the pessimists, for they shall have made backups.

and keep some backups off-site

[AnotherFairportfan]

After about twelve hours of scanning, Partition Recovery found all the files - currently we're recovering the first 100 gig (the most important, though they are also the ones i have backups of) and we're at 60% - i've played a couple of the MP3s and they play fine.

However, the two PDFs seem to be scrambled... (Luckily, not anything important.)

[Atomic]

For what it's worth, I have everthing I want to keep in a folder called /Data with subdirectories for letters, art, etc, and various projects. This way, when I do back ups, I have a single folder to drag and drop to an external drive. In my case, a 1TB drive that's currently eight deep with backups and plenty of room for more.

More than once I've had to rebuild Windows and expand the various partitions to deal with cruft accumulation or such, and restoring a single folder (with tons of subs) makes life easier.

Good luck on a full and speedy recovery!

[Warrl]

For what it's worth, I have everthing I want to keep in a folder called /Data with subdirectories for letters, art, etc, and various projects. This way, when I do back ups, I have a single folder to drag and drop to an external drive. In my case, a 1TB drive that's currently eight deep with backups and plenty of room for more.

That may be all YOUR data, but Windows and a bunch of apps also keep data (including but not limited to settings) of their own that is important to you and you have no choice about where that is stored.

[TazManiac]

Just as an aside, Id like to add

When installing Ubuntu, or other Linux flavor s, choose the 'something else' option during Partitioning and create storage spaces for the OS & Data (/Home) partitions.

Makes it a little easier down the road to secure and if necessary, recover your data.

[AnotherFairportfan]

Just as an aside, Id like to add

When installing Ubuntu, or other Linux flavor s, choose the 'something else' option during Partitioning and create storage spaces for the OS & Data (/Home) partitions.

Makes it a little easier down the road to secure and if necessary, recover your data.

Normally, running in automatic mode, the Ubuntu installer will find any unallocated/unpartitioned ares on your drives and automatically create its partitions there.

Unfortunately, i wound up needing to re-install Xubuntu as a result of nuking the Windows 10 Technical Preview, which had its own partition and boot recordon the same physical drive as my "D:" drive, so it apparently interpreted the entire 1 tb drive as being available.

[TazManiac]

(If I post a smiley face here, it's not Schadenfreude....)



aFPF, If sometimes I reply with stuff you already know it's often because we're not the only two reading the thread. It's a habit I got into a long time ago. (I unfortunately am posting in these here particular forums way late/early so.... culpa de mia in advance.)

PS- I'm currently running Lubuntu on the laptop but it's mix of apps and utils frustrate me too much; (low irritation factor but I've reached my REM limit of exposure) so I'm switching back to Ubuntu Studio (14.04). I like Xubuntu's front end for many reasons as well but after I get don't tweaking it's going to be pretty much xxx Studio anyway, so...

Truth be told, and as much as I've berated folks for not backing up during my doing my disaster recovery function, I hardly do a full-on archive anymore, maybe quarterly at best. (Damn, I shouldn't have typed that...)

[AnotherFairportfan]

Truth be told, and as much as I've berated folks for not backing up during my doing my disaster recovery function, I hardly do a full-on archive anymore, maybe quarterly at best. (Damn, I shouldn't have typed that...)

I pull a full system image daily.

Wish i could figure out how to get Windows Backup to pull images alternately to two different locations.

[TazManiac]

I'm thinking you are going to need a third party app for something like that...

[AnotherFairportfan]

Yeah. a quick run to Gizmo's Freeware put me onto AOMEI Backupper; i figure i'll pull alternate images to different disks so that a disk crash or an image pulled from an already-bad system disk won't leave me dead in the water.

[Dave]

I've also come to like the practice of using a RAID 0 (mirrored) configuration for the non-disposable filesystems on the machines I use regularly.

It addresses a different aspect of the problem... sudden hardware failure, rather than a software or user error which clobbers files. One still needs backups (preferably offsite if possible) to cope with such things.

Having a "live" disk mirror has saved me at least twice... two disk failures which would otherwise have required that I completely rebuild/reinstall the machine and restore from the best-available backups. As it was, I just "failed out" the disk that had died, started a full backup just for good luck, got a replacement drive (under warranty in both cases), ran single-disk until it arrived, then installed it and partitioned it and added the partitions to the RAID mirror sets. A few hours, to a day of disk copying (automatic, in the background) and full redundancy was reestablished.

Much less grief than a rebuild.

I use the Linux software RAID... no need for an expensive dedicated RAID controller, just a spare SATA port.

[Atomic]

For what it's worth, I have everthing I want to keep in a folder called /Data with subdirectories for letters, art, etc, and various projects. This way, when I do back ups, I have a single folder to drag and drop to an external drive. In my case, a 1TB drive that's currently eight deep with backups and plenty of room for more.

That may be all YOUR data, but Windows and a bunch of apps also keep data (including but not limited to settings) of their own that is important to you and you have no choice about where that is stored.

True -- but if my drive crumps, I plan for worst case clean install of OS and my main programs (loaders also on backup) and have the fiddly bits like Gimp Fonts and Brushes in their own folders as well. All the rest I can tweak as needed.

[AnotherFairportfan]

Most current mobos have built-in RAID capability - my Gigabyte 970A does - with several pages in the manual on how to set it up for RAID 0 before installing the operating system.

[TazManiac]

Yeah, I have two same model 250gig drives set aside to play around with rudimentary RAID, Truth is, while I've worked on them recently, I haven't actually set up my own RAID stem in a long time, not this Century at any rate...

[lake_wrangler]

I've also come to like the practice of using a RAID 0 (mirrored) configuration for the non-disposable filesystems on the machines I use regularly.

It addresses a different aspect of the problem... sudden hardware failure, rather than a software or user error which clobbers files. One still needs backups (preferably offsite if possible) to cope with such things.

Actually, RAID 0 is striping, and RAID 1 is mirroring... but no matter how you call it, it sure is nice to have. I intend to set up something like that, when I upgrade my system, later this year.

Having a "live" disk mirror has saved me at least twice... two disk failures which would otherwise have required that I completely rebuild/reinstall the machine and restore from the best-available backups. As it was, I just "failed out" the disk that had died, started a full backup just for good luck, got a replacement drive (under warranty in both cases), ran single-disk until it arrived, then installed it and partitioned it and added the partitions to the RAID mirror sets. A few hours, to a day of disk copying (automatic, in the background) and full redundancy was reestablished.

Much less grief than a rebuild.

Good for you!

I use the Linux software RAID... no need for an expensive dedicated RAID controller, just a spare SATA port.

Do you know if it is found in all Distros of Linux? Is it part of the kernel, or something that comes with certain distros only? How do you access it/set it up?

[lake_wrangler]

PS- I'm currently running Lubuntu on the laptop but it's mix of apps and utils frustrate me too much; (low irritation factor but I've reached my REM limit of exposure) so I'm switching back to Ubuntu Studio (14.04). I like Xubuntu's front end for many reasons as well but after I get don't tweaking it's going to be pretty much xxx Studio anyway, so...

When MS stopped supporting XP, I installed Lubuntu on my laptop, but i would not suspend properly. So I started over, and installed Linux Mint Debian Edition (with Cinnamon desktop environment). It works like a charm.

I am considering switching my main comp to Linux, but I am still looking into which distro to use. Ubuntu Studio is one option, to help with recording my saxophone and bass clarinet, to make accompaniment tracks for me to sing with. How do you like Ubuntu Studio? Do you use it for media creation? How well does it work as a general distro, otherwise?

[jwhouk]

Thing is, if I was going to go the Linux route, I'd probably just stick with a Mac. I'm more familiar with it (though my iBook is ancient) and have a lot more stuff that's compatible.

[Dave]

Actually, RAID 0 is striping, and RAID 1 is mirroring... but no matter how you call it, it sure is nice to have. I intend to set up something like that, when I upgrade my system, later this year.

Correct.

The configuration I actually use is referred to by the Linux software as "RAID 10". The data is mirrored, but each mirror disk offsets the start of the data by a different amount. This offsetting can give the system a better optimization of the "head elevator" algorithm when scheduling reads (and splitting them between the two drives)

Do you know if it is found in all Distros of Linux? Is it part of the kernel, or something that comes with certain distros only? How do you access it/set it up?

I imagine it's in all distro other than the smallest, most special-purpose ones. I know Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat/CentOS all provide it.

The low-level striping/mirroring stuff is part of the kernel... the "md" (multiple-disk) block-device driver. Works on top of any block disk... IDE, SATA, SCSI, flash, etc. or a mix thereof. Setup and management is via "mdadm", a program included in the distro. Debian and I believe the other distros I mentioned usually let you set up the mirror configuration during the original install. If not (or if you change your mind later and want one) you can add a second disk, partition, set up a "two disk" RAID set with one disk marked absent, transfer your file systems over, reboot into the RAID fiesystems, then repartition the first disk and add it to the RAID set (the data will be sync'ed automatically). I've done that a couple of times.

One gotcha... not all bootloaders can boot from all types of RAID volume. I keep a small non-RAID /boot partition on each disk with the kernel so that GRUB can find it. I now prefer to use the new GPT partition format rather than the old DOS style... no more cylinder/head nonsense, no "4 primary partition" limit... just remember to include a small (2-3 MB) "BIOS boot partition" for the GRUB bootloader.

You can even make a RAiD mirror from two large disks, then split up the mirrored space flexibly into adjustable-sized logical volumes using "lvm". I haven't tried that yet.

I think it's superior to using the proprietary RAID implementations in a PC BIOS.