undo rm -rf *

[Bill Davidsen]

Celik wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 1:49 AM, Bill Oliver <vendor at billoblog.com
> <mailto:vendor at billoblog.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     The last time this happened to me, I had some luck using sleuthkit:
>
>     http://www.sleuthkit.org/
>
>     As you noted, installing new things on your computer is destructive to
>     deleted files.  It's a good idea, if you can, to make an image of your disk
>     asap and then work on that image.  What I have done is put a live distro on
>     a flash drive, boot from the live distro, dd the native disk to an external
>     drive, and then run the recovery utils on the image.
>
>     billo
>
>
> Bill, re-did the work. Because it was fresh in my mind, it didn't take as long.
>
> The tasks you have mentioned (i.e. making an image of disk and dd) are new to
> me. I'll try to follow the steps with some dummy files on my laptop. The laptop
> is for testing new programs if anything goes wrong won't cause much heart-ache.
>
> Please excuse me if this going to be a silly question, so can we use dd for
> making backups of our files/computer? or can we make an image of our disk solely
> for a backup purpose?
>
>
You can use dd to make a bit for bit backup of your drive to an identical (or 
larger) drive. That is useful, but quite time consuming. To back up the files 
you can use tar in more cases, assuming you are not doing anything truly bizarre 
with extended attributes, access control lists, (shudder) using hard links to 
directories. A normal filesystem backs up far faster and smaller using a tool 
like tar or one of the specialized packages.

For keeping a full backup I highly recommend looking at rsync, which can keep 
your files backed up in a very efficient manner.

Note that if you choose "cloud backup" from one of the vendors, on many network 
connections the upload speed is far slower than the download speed, and you 
spend a lot of time backing up. Mentioned because people forget until they try 
to do something large and it takes forever.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot