I just discovered something I did so idiotic I need a stronger adjective that what is in my name.
For one of my installs, I accidentally overwrote my 1TB HDD. A few minutes ago I wanted to put back some files… and all I saw was a distro.
It confused me because I was not sure if I was on my solid state drive or the HDD.
So, those files are gone. A lot is gone. Nothing too precious, I think… It might be a tremendous fuck up.
See kids, this is why you back up. Off the computer. Oh well.
EDIT: Recovering files using Photorec. Everyone who recommended this to me is a hero. Also a hero is the person who recommended FTK, but I was too eager to use something now than to sign up to download. I still should though…
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THANK YOU EVERYONE who recommended PHOTOREC! This community is fantastic.
You might be able to rebuild your partitions with testdisk, too. Work from a backup.
Neat. I will try that once photorec finishes its search in like a month from now.
Accidentally flashed a live image (PCBSD, IIRC) onto my 1TB external HDD instead of the thumb drive. Lost years of collected music and movies that night. I learned two things:
- Don’t do this sort of thing in the middle of the night, when you’re tired and should be sleeping.
ddis nicknamed ‘disk destroyer’ for good reason.
😵💫 the 3am tinkering, it calls to me 😵💫
Never dd at 3am, kids.
Not done it at 3am but have dd’d to the wrong disk late in the evening, possibly after a few vinos
Fortunately my laptop only has nvmes built in, so 99% of the time all 3am me has to do is not type nvme and I’m good
- Disconnect all other drives
When using dd, check the command before pressing enter, then check it again for good measure.
then replace dd with cat or cp.
… no use in dd to write an image to disk. Just use cat/cp/pv…
dd is a scalpell, not a shovel.
Oh, am I talking to myself? Hah.
Yeah, I wish I had all the stuff I torrented in high school. Lost treasure.
Late to the party but this why I like Ventoy. It only looks for removable drives and then all you do is drag and drop your live images onto the removable drive. Pretty hard to mess anything up.
Before you perform another task on that hard drive, try photorec. You might be able to get a majority of your files back if they’re important
I guess I can try it, since I did not like, wipe everything.
I remember shortly after college I was living with a couple of people and one day we all heard “NOOOOOOOOOO!” and went running to see what tragedy happened. He had started formatting the one porn drive he had been collecting on over the last few years.
That is is a special kind grieving.
I’ll never forget that scream, I thought a sound like that was reserved for when the cat ran behind the couch and stepped on the surge protector button, corrupting the hard drive as you were almost finished writing your graduate thesis, which wasn’t backed up yet.
Honestly a thesis is way higher stakes and value. Yeah, imagine thinking there was an emergency only to find out your roommate will need to spend the rest of the semester using their imagination.
Yeah, we definitely had fun at his expense for a while after that.
I would be mortified. He seems shameless though, hah.
He was in community theater. What shame?
Ah. I was in theater tech. No shame to find anywhere.
Make a donation to the testdisk author!
I will! These programs are amazing.
Expecting things to be different.
The differences do seem enormous when one first encounters linux. They shrink every install though, but it takes some time for the magic to wear off.
I accidentally formatted a drive with a Bitcoin wallet on it. Back a number of years ago. Fun times.
Oof. I mean… yes. Oof.
Installing GNOME on Kubuntu I think, hahaaha.
DEs get so wonky if you try to change them. I wish it was easier to compartmentalize an envirionment.
Its possible using homedir backup etc. Or on Fedora Atomic simply switching desktops. But yeah Desktops are all over the place, having a ~/.kde folder where EVERYTHING is stored would be great.
Thank you.
Oh, I am on Fedora Silverblue with Gnome. If it is easy to switch, I think I will give KDE a try!
I like Gnome, and I definitely need to tweak some behavior I find annoying, but I feel I never gave KDE a proper chance because I seem to mess up the panel whenever I look at it wrong, and have no idea how to get back to default.
Yeeah that panel. The only problem is opening the start menu with “super” though. You can always add a “default” panel.
Maybe do it like this: create a keyboard shortcut ctrl+alt+t for konsole, whyever it is not default. Then remove all panels and run
qdbus org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer 0 0 1(alias that to “logout” in your .bashrc, its a horrible command).Then remove all panels and logout. Log back in, add a default panel and maybe you are already good. Maybe log out again. The only default panel normally always gets the correct start menu. Its a bit messed up.
To switch between silverblue and kinoite you can just rebase, but make sure to backup all your “dotfiles” (the hidden configs for all the apps) and start plain, as you dont want to mix these.
There is a youtube video on exactly that somewhere.
Ah, thank you for the write up. I will actually do that because KDE something I know I will like and enjoy more than GNOME once I get past some of the weirdness. Mostly, I want to customize it in certain ways, and while GNOME surely is customizable, it is not as easy as KDE.
Yeah, rebasing feels like some scifi future tech and I am ready to play. It is like resleeving ala Altered Carbon.
I am not sure. KDE is very customizable and I like the… regular way apps work, trays work, decorations work and all that. Also GNOME is like the anti-poweruser desktop. I like its style, but its like “use a terminal or nothing”. Needing extra apps for every small thing and all…
The downside maybe is stability… and Gnome does some things well, like quicksettings and all.
I also like that GTK is easier to develop for probably, with Gnome Builder and similar tooling. But at the same time, the UI would be pretty much unusable for complex apps like Dolphin.
I tried Gimp 3.x prerelease and well, GTK3 is weird, its already this step away from the more similar styles.
Well rebasing is pretty nice, its swapping out the foundation while keeping the top intact. For things like Kinoite->Ublue-kinoite-main its just a reboot.
Do you need to pin the last working ostree before rebasing? I guess I want an easy way to switch between working environments without a lot of rebasing.
Installed Manjaro sway and now i want back to xfce, but i really dont want to reinstall again…
I got started in Linux about 15 years ago. I’m not skilled nor a techie but knowledgeable enough to make things work. After running endless cracked windows machines I switched to Linux and started distro hopping. But I didn’t have enough money at the time to afford a lot of hard drive space.
I remember going from one distro to another while trying to transfer a couple of GBs worth of work on the same drive. Two GB of data was a big deal to me at the time. At one point late one night after about the tenth distro attempt, I wiped an entire drive worth of my unbacked up work. Worst moment of digital loss I ever had.
I’ve kept double triple and quadruple backups since then … and I still worry about losing data.
That is haunting.
I tend to be pretty cavalier with my data, because only recently have I started amassing anything of value (starting to be the adult I needed to be 10 years ago).
Yes… I have some storage shopping to do.
It was waaay past midnight when I made my mistake. I should have been sleeping at least 3 hours before.
It sounds like you need to learn about disk forensics before you go any further. Check out FTK
Hah, I don’t think I illustrated how dumb I am. I deleted the partitions already.
Unless it was encrypted, it prob doesn’t matter. The partition table is just the road map that points to the houses (files). A tool like FTK or PhotoRec goes byte by byte to find the files and figure out what they are. You won’t have file names, but the data might still be there.
I got it running now! I did not have that much to recovery, so everything will fit in home. Mostly word files, PDFs, and pictures. Few movies and music.
Oh, I’ve nuked partitions in the past before, and was able to recover using photorec, when doing it, just make sure you don’t save the files to the drive you’re running recovery on
Good tip! I… would maybe have realized that would worsen the situation.
Also, all of us have done things because we didn’t know better. The only dumb thing to do here is to not learn how to fix this. Try and fail, so next time you know how it works and can do better.
Thank you! This is just my way of laughing at the situation. I am definitely learning some new skills like data recovery and critical thinking.
You can still recover.
I shall try!!
I’m concerned at the number of people who boot new OS’s without backing up their computer.
Thank you for your concern, hah!
Yeah, I admit the mistake happened long before last night.
Appreciate the good humor on your part! I’m just being a bit tongue in cheek but PSA: everyone should follow 3-2-1 backup protocol! You’ll never lose your data again!
3 backups
2 formats
1 off-siteSo I recommend everyone get 2 decent HDD’s (2nd is clone of 1st) and 1TB of cloud storage. Most services are under $100/yr and let me tell you, you’ll want to spend 5x that to save half of what you lose without it. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to follow this system.
I may or may not have a OneDrive account that I was paying 2 bucks for but cancelled when it charged full price. I may actually have a lot of the important stuff on there!
Alas, none of the newer stuff like my upated password manager key and anything else after I ended my brief return to Windows.
Yeah, cloud storage is not the monster after all.
I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that’s actually good advice.
The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.
Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.
I’m sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.
There is a way to recover it. You can use a root shell aka recovery shell (usually available through your GRUB menu) to change the permissions on your home directory. But just reinstalling was probably easier anyway.
All you really would’ve need to do is update the ownership via root user, which you can actually do from the installer. Kinda funny cause you already went through the process of mounting and running the installer, so you were already there.
I’ve done
rm -rf /twice on Fedora installs.I think I have done that a couple of times intentionally. Seems like one of those cognitive dangers that is harmful because you know it.
I wiped my drive with a lot of non-backed-up data on it intentionally because the Fedora installer was too confusing. Lost among other things my Celeste and Minecraft saves, a lot of images, and other stuff with sentimental value.
Unless you meant to destroy all of that data, that was unintentional not intentional.
It was intentional, it was just also dumb and a bad decision
You meant to destroy your data?
Yes, I didn’t think about it a lot before doing it, that’s why it was dumb
Damn. I am sorry for that loss. I agree, I am always boggled every time I use the Fedora installer. I don’t know how I clicked the wrong disk. I didn’t read close enough, or I don’t know.
I hope the new things you make are better than what was wiped.
Tbh I don’t even remember much of the stuff that I lost anymore. I had a lot of images, a legally downloaded series, a good amount of legally downloaded music that I keep forgetting I don’t have on my phone, the aforementioned game saves, and I don’t remember more rn. I was luckily more creative during school so the more important stuff (Siberian sniper crocodile) was on another device.
Lucky me most of the important stuff are things I have on another computer, or can redownload from email or whatever service that needed it.
But my new passwords… oh well. Recovery is typically easy.
What sucks is losing things you did not know you would need or miss until much later.
Reading this thread makes me appreciate Macrium Reflect and my 64TB worth of redundant backup drives even more.
I might need to look into building a storage server of some kind. That is super cool.
Personally, I keep the redundant backup as cold storage to minimize loss. Three 8TB content or archival drives that are always attached via USB but not powered until needed, plus another on NAS for streaming, and two more 8TB each for double backup that are only turned on when I want to do a sync. So the drives get minimal wear, and whenever a primary dies, the backups get promoted and a new one is bought to be third in line. I have lost too much data in the past. As well as I can manage, never ever again.
What is kind of funny is that my computer has the SSD for system and home, and I only ever used the storage to copy over files from my home. I also have a little 1TB SSD That I could have used as an offline backup… but didn’t do that. I had the tools, just never thought to do it. I will look into a NAS, that would be nifty. Can’t bork that with a new install.
It only takes a few tragic events before “backup frequently, often and offline” really takes hold and doing preemptive backup becomes a neurosis. You have to experience a certain amount of fear, loss and regret to get there.
edit: the upside is I haven’t reinstalled a primary OS in years. Something is fucked? Restore that last image and keep rolling.
Yes. I think I am closer to data paranoia… I need a system.
That sounds nice. Not having a system that becomes terminally broken after a bad decision.
