A long story of restoring a 2 TB backup disk
The story in short as an experience report:
* Backpack with encrypted ubuntu notebook stolen.
* Checking backup disk on windows was fine, but unmounting was not. * Disk corrupted * Bought 4TB disk to recover 2TB disk ** Truecrypt on Linux did not mount anything ** Truecrypt on Windows mounted corrupted disk * Started testdisk for recovery * Started photorec for recovery * Restore takes 140hours, finds 3000 folders with 500 files each * Let windows dig for xfc and odt files
* Let notepad++ dig for txt, sh, svg files * Two weeks later restore almost finished ... yeee
Fixing the disk or access the data with testdisk failed for me, but photorec (another recovery tool from the same developer but with a signature-based file recovery strategy, a different approach) did restore most of my missing files after 140h on a 2TB disk. Worth donating to the guy!
Photorec is part of the Testdisk download bundle. Get it here:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download How the Photorec restore worked in my case:
1. Configure Photorec: Photorec looks for the selected file types on the damaged disk based on the file header's signature. When it finds such files it copies them to another disk. If the disk is very large it is important to deselect all file types and then just check the ones you are really looking for, else it will take forever (420+ hours estimated with no file type filter in my case). It's worth saying that restoring .sh, .svg, .java files have the same signature as plain .txt files, so finding a special file after the restore may need advanced search skills.
2. Start Photorec: As soon as you give the "start" command, it starts copying to directories named like "recup_dir.1". After 140 hours of restoring I had 3270 directories with about 500 files in each folder. Each restored file has a number so you can not seach by filename but only by metadata or content. Thus the per-directory restore via testdisk is much more convenient - if it works.
Sidenote: In my case it was an 2 TB NTFS partition within a hidden truecrypt container. Windows was able to create the virtual drive, but in linux mounting the partition was interrupted and no virtual node was created. So I did my restore on a win7 box. Photorec does not modify the damaged disk, so the restore process can be repeated as often as needed.
Lessons learned: again, improve backup strategy. #
automate, #
automate, #
automate! To multiple disks!
Now I have one backup job via #
deja-vu / #
duplicity to my intranet #
owncloud server. Works like a charm! But I still need to use the old backup scripts for getting data from other targets like #
wordpress #
owncloud #
liferay #
smartphone and #
samba, so I still use my handcrafted backup scripts for this task.
#
backup #
recovery #
truecrypt #
hidden #
volume #
ntfs #
ntfs-3g #
testdisk #
photorec #
stolen #
notebook #
laptop #
trauma
Download TestDisk & PhotoRec. TestDisk is a free and open source data recovery software tool designed to recover lost partition and unerase deleted files. PhotoRec is a file carver data recovery software tool.
