Please Help - I have made a horrible mistake

[FLVAL]

To recover pictures it’s easier than others data, in spite of Testdisk use PhotoRec it’s the same guy Christophe Grenier who did it.

I used it few times and it worked well.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

[Tasia91]

@lhb1142

Rather than overwriting the documents on those hard drives (which takes quite a long time), I always delete the old Documents folder on them and then copy the latest Documents folder to them.

I know this won’t help at this point, but you could have used rsync for that, which would overwrite only files that were modified and in general has a whole lot of useful options.

I hope you will be able to recover your files

[freebird54]

I haven’t seen this thought mentioned yet - but if the ‘backup’ folder was just deleted as well, could it not be recovered? With any luck, the files missing in one might be in the other - or the ‘older’ versions of files might suffice in case of no luck with the original…

[lhb1142]

@FLVAL

Like @Dalto said, most important first is to create an ISO of the disk you want recover data then work only on this picture ISO to not touch your original data lost.

On this way, you are totally safe to try everything you want with Testdisk. You would have to prepare a space around 100Go to copy the data you lost on it.

That is exactly the problem. I haven’t been able to sleep so I have been up all night trying different things.

I inserted my EOS ISO usb drive and, using PhotoRec rather than using TestDisk again (my computer has only one SSD of 1 TB which is configured as 105 MB EFI and 931 MB as ext4), I was able to recover about 9.7 GB before the USB Live Disk ran out of space. This thumb drive is 32 GB.

I immediately copied the recovered files to another 128 GB thumb drive (which was mostly empty). So I have all of them saved.

I then flashed the ISO to another 256 GB thumb drive (these things tend to accumulate) but I still has the same problem. It seems that the ISO Live Disk is only about 10 GB or so and I do not know of any way to increase that size when I’m flashing the thumb drive. (Balena-Etcher gave a notice that this was an unusually large drive to which I wanted to flash the ISO but, once it was done, it made no difference.)

I could also find no way to send the files to another 128 GB thumb drive I also had inserted. It seems that PhotoRec will only copy to some place (your choice) on the Live Disk drive.

Is there a way to expand the size of the Live Disk ISO as I’m creating it so that all of my Documents (about 91 GB) will fit onto it?

Thanks for the help. A local computer store opens at 10:00 AM (if they are still operating during this pandemic) and I may have to call them to see if A) they are familiar with GNU/Linux systems on SSDs and, B) if they think that they can recover my Documents folder.

Evidently it CAN be done as I was able to recover at least part of it.

Lawrence

[lhb1142]

@freebird54

I haven’t seen this thought mentioned yet - but if the ‘backup’ folder was just deleted as well, could it not be recovered? With any luck, the files missing in one might be in the other - or the ‘older’ versions of files might suffice in case of no luck with the original…

That’s something I have already thought of. A slight snag may be that all four of my external hard drives are encrypted; you must put in the password in order for them to mount. I do not know whether or not this would be a problem.

You’re right of course. The changes I had made to my Documents folder were minimal as I backup my computer several times a week.

When (if) I speak to the computer technician, I’ll ask him about this very subject.

Lawrence

[lhb1142]

@Tasia91

@lhb1142

Rather than overwriting the documents on those hard drives (which takes quite a long time), I always delete the old Documents folder on them and then copy the latest Documents folder to them.

I know this won’t help at this point, but you could have used rsync for that, which would overwrite only files that were modified and in general has a whole lot of useful options.

I hope you will be able to recover your files

Thanks for this but I took a look at rsync and it looks to be far too complicated for me to use. I don’t mind backing up the way I do it (when I don’t cause a catastrophe) because I generally back up the necessary folders on the computer during lunch or dinner. When I finish eating, it’s all done.

Lawrence

[lhb1142]

@lhb1142

Is there a way to expand the size of the Live Disk ISO as I’m creating it so that all of my Documents (about 91 GB) will fit onto it?

Can anyone tell me how to expand the size of the Live Disk as I’m creating it (using Balena-Etcher and flashing it to a 256 GB thumb drive) so that the Live Disk will be able to hold my Documents folder (about 91 GB)?

Thank you - and thanks to everyone here who has been trying to help me.

Lawrence

[lhb1142]

@nate

@lhb1142 I was about to suggest to stop anything you do to that computer and bring it to a recovery expert if the files are important to you. It’s not a time to experiment around if those files are valuable. Any additional mistakes you make, especially if you don’t really understand what you are doing will cause an even greater difficulty in recovering those files, even professionally.

A non technical advice here (although maybe this site is not the place for such things, but we are still all human after all):
Accidents happen. Don’t worry too much about it. It helps more if you just focus on solutions instead of going over and over a thing that you can’t simply undo. And nothing is worth your health (well, maybe saving another one’s life or health)
Stop for a second and tell yourself things are not so bad as they seem. A fire could have destroyed your pc and backup drive, or any other sum of bad things.
Just accept the loss (of money in this case, especially if you have to pay a professional) and move on. You’ll have to put some effort in solving this. Accept that and just do it. It will pass.

I just want to add another thing: I had this happen to me in the past: I accidentally deleted my Photo directory and some other personal files. Years worth of photographic images of my life. I was crushed, but then I realized, I never revisited those pictures. Never took the time to actually browse through them. I did so just initially when I organized them. So I realized they don’t really mean so much to me. Yes they are irreplaceable, but their value to me was not so high if I went back and thought about it. I extended that thought about other files on my system which I was hoarding and hauling along on any new system install and realized a lot of that was just a dead weight. The files I needed and were lost I recovered through other means, or recreated them.

Since that accident I really have very few files that are crucial stored solely on my PC. Really important files I send to myself over email and store somewhere in the cloud (if I use gmail then I don’t use google drive but dropbox, so they’re not with the same service provider).

Dear Nate,

Thank you for your comments. You’re right of course - this isn’t the worst thing that could possibly have happened to me. My wife and I are still relatively healthy, we’re not starving, and we have a roof over our heads…

But this folder has ALL of my financial data, ALL of the questions and solutions for using Linux that I have accumulated over the years, every piece of information and instructions concerning use of the programs I use, ALL of my passwords, etc., etc. etc.

Those Documents are extremely important to me and I’ll do anything I have to in order to recover them (if that’s even possible. Some websites say that it’s impossible to recover accidentally deleted files/folders from an SSD but I have been able to recover at least a few files).

But thanks for your comments. They made me feel a little bit better. And I do have to say that it was only the Documents that have been lost, not any of my Pictures, Music, or Videos.

Lawrence

[lhb1142]

@ricklinux

When you select the drive to save the files to it should be another drive that is not where the files are lost on. You don’t want to write to that drive and you don’t want to save it to the live ISO either.

Neither TestDisk nor PhotoRec (running from the Live ISO) allow me to save the recovered files anywhere except somewhere on the Live ISO - and that doesn’t have enough space to hold all of them.

That’s the real problem!

Can the Live ISO be expanded in size - or is there another Live recovery ISO (say, something like Knoppix which I have not yet investigated) which can be made larger?

Lawrence

[freebird54]

One thought that occurs to me - can you make the ‘live’ ISO persistent? I gather the flash drives are sufficiently large, so if they allowed storage on themselves it should allow it to be saved as found…

Another thought for the future - delete the backup only AFTER the new copy has been saved (and checked for completeness - maybe meld?)

[BONK]

Mx Linux has a persistent usb option. Maybe try to use that to recover the data?

[lhb1142]

@freebird54

One thought that occurs to me - can you make the ‘live’ ISO persistent? I gather the flash drives are sufficiently large, so if they allowed storage on themselves it should allow it to be saved as found…

Dear freebird54,

How do you go about making the Live Disk persistent? The flash drive I now have the EOS Live Disk flashed to is 256 GB. That’s plenty large to hold everything but, as TestDisk and PhotoRec only allow me to copy the files to the Live Disk, which is only about 10 GB, I can’t get them all.

Thanks for your suggestion. I also wish someone would tell me how to send the recovered files from the Live Disk to another mounted external thumb drive. I can see no way to do that.

Lawrence

[lhb1142]

@BONK

Mx Linux has a persistent usb option. Maybe try to use that to recover the data?

How do you use that? I could easily create a Live Disk of MX Linux but then what would I do?

Thanks for the suggestion.

Lawrence

[BONK]

Their site explains it. One other thought can you attach the files to an email account from the live iso? Then you could email them to yourself. Would take a loooooong time but maybe possible.

[freebird54]

I don’t have a link handy to explain it - but the info is easily found on the web. Ubuntu I know has several walk-throughs, and it sounds like MX does as well (they have great documentation there). The size won’t be a problem. As for copying the data later, there should be no difficulty - it will be stored on a disk, (the thumb drive) that can be copied to another disk without complication.

[lhb1142]

Dear freebird54,

I just went to their site and saw how to do it (make the drive persistent). But I just telephoned the local computer store and the technician says that he can recover the folder (and its files) for about $100.00 to $125.00.

I’m going to take the computer over there this afternoon. I’m really afraid of losing the data if I play around much more with it.

You know, “they” ought to make/create some easy-to-use program to recover files/folders that have been accidentally permanently deleted. I think that lots of people would find that to be very useful. I immediately realized what I had done and if there were some program that was easy to use, I could have recovered the folder right away.

I do thank everyone who has taken the time to respond to me. Even though I haven’t been entirely successful in recovering my entire Documents folder, the information given here has been of extreme interest to me.

If this shop can recover the folder, great. If it can’t, well I’ll be back.

Thanks again to ALL.

Lawrence

[2000]

I’ve never used TestDisk but what I gather from reading the above posts is that one can’t choose an external drive as a destination for recovered files and you run into storage space issues - right?

Possible solution:

1. Boot EOS live iso
2. Install TestDisk
3. find out where testdisk stores recovered files
4. attach external drive
5. mount this external drive to the testdisk recovery folder
6. run testdisk & cross fingers

[ricklinux]

As far as I am concerned MX is the best at persistence. I have tried a lot and MX just does it right.

[ricklinux]

@lhb1142
Sorry that you have run into this problem. I know it has caused you a lot of anxiety. I hope you can get the files recovered.

[FLVAL]

Lawrence,

Sorry for the time of answer.
The good news if you used only Photorec is without consequences for your Data in spite of TestDisk which could right on your disk on raw level to repair bad block, partitions or structure or table etc…knowing that data written on a disk never goes to garbage until you replace it by another data, TestDisk is able to find your old partitions or old data…when you think they doesn’t exists anymore !

Now you know that get only 1 big partition on a disk is maybe not the best way to do. Always better to divide the same Disk in few partitions at least 2 with 1 for backup. In case of problem you don’t have to deal with 1To space !

In your case, to not make the situation baddest, buy another Drive not expensive like SEAGATE - Barracuda 1 To - 3.5’’ SATA III 6 Go/s - Cache 64 Mo, this one is 48€ in France or whatever you prefer then clone your damaged disk on it by security before to bring it to your local computer store. At least, before they touch it, you could still keep an image of your data. Then work on your clone in installing Photorec on it, cause Photorec recover data on the same disk it’s installed…give it a try before to pay 100 or 150$ and you are safe in working on your clone disk and more you could learn Photorec and Testdisk for futur.

I used Photorec Testdisk for a while last year, and got some results when really you understood the way it goes it’s very usefull. I’m wondering if I used it with an old live usb repair tool that contains Testdisk and others staff or if I installed it on another drive ! What is weird I don’t remember to get this limitation of space, in my souvenirs, it seems that I could reach other drive to copy data on it !!

I will try to check this next week, a little tuto could be helpfull. I’m really busy until the exam day next week.