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I love you Theodore Ts'o, let me have your babies
by Acidus at 2:31 am EDT, Apr 17, 2008

My RAID 5 array died 2 days ago. And my heart just about stopped.

Actually only a single drive died, but in the process of failing the drive in mdadm and adding a new one, somehow ext3 freaked out. Superblocks gone. filesystem, unmountable. Testdisk couldn't find any superblocks and insisted that the 320GB array I was pointing it contained a 13TB HFS+ partition.

Holy Shit!

Every document I wrote
Every piece of code I wrote
Documents and code I was legally required to destroy years ago
Every digital picture I had taken
Every email I had sent
All my music and videos

Essentially the record of my life, both digital and non, since 1996 was gone.

Holy Shit!

Sure I had backups, but they were spotty at best, and some of these are on CDs of dubious quality that I had burned literally 11 years ago.

Holy Shit!

I was almost beyond hope and was about to call SE2600 friend Scott Moulton when I saw a passing reference to debugfs on a forum post. I fire it up, point it a /dev/md0 and at the prompt do an ls.

...

and I can see my directories!

... ok ok [breathes] ... [checks man debugfs] ...

debugfs: rdump publications /tmp/
debugfs:

Could it be?

acidus@hatter:~$ cd /tmp/publications

HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! Ode to joy and all that lot, I can recover my data!

[HR inappropriate victory dance]

Theodore Ts'o, I love, and if I ever meet you, I just might make sweet sweet love to you down by the fire. Serious. I crave my obsolete and poorly written C code that badly.

PS: The only thing I couldn't recover with debugfs were some 4+ GB files that were flat text files and MySQL dumps. debugfs coredumps. Luckily the code which crawled the in-tar-web to assemble this data was still around and working, and so the data is reproduceable.

RE: I love you Theodore Ts'o, let me have your babies
by Lost at 1:45 pm EDT, Apr 17, 2008

Acidus wrote:
My RAID 5 array died 2 days ago. And my heart just about stopped.
Actually only a single drive died, but in the process of failing the drive in mdadm and adding a new one, somehow ext3 freaked out. Superblocks gone. filesystem, unmountable. Testdisk couldn't find any superblocks and insisted that the 320GB array I was pointing it contained a 13TB HFS+ partition.
Holy Shit!
Every document I wrote
Every piece of code I wrote
Documents and code I was legally required to destroy years ago
Every digital picture I had taken
Every email I had sent
All my music and videos
Essentially the record of my life, both digital and non, since 1996 was gone.
Holy Shit!
Sure I had backups, but they were spotty at best, and some of these are on CDs of dubious quality that I had burned literally 11 years ago.
Holy Shit!
I was almost beyond hope and was about to call SE2600 friend Scott Moulton when I saw a passing reference to debugfs on a forum post. I fire it up, point it a /dev/md0 and at the prompt do an ls.
...
...
and I can see my directories!
... ok ok [breathes] ... [checks man debugfs] ...
debugfs: rdump publications /tmp/
debugfs:
Could it be?
acidus@hatter:~$ cd /tmp/publications
HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! Ode to joy and all that lot, I can recover my data!
[HR inappropriate victory dance]
Theodore Ts'o, I love, and if I ever meet you, I just might make sweet sweet love to you down by the fire. Serious. I crave my obsolete and poorly written C code that badly.
PS: The only thing I couldn't recover with debugfs were some 4+ GB files that were flat text files and MySQL dumps. debugfs coredumps. Luckily the code which crawled the in-tar-web to assemble this data was still around and working, and so the data is reproduceable.

Any particular reason you were using ext3? :)