Full disclosure, I was rushing and ended up deleting something I shouldn’t have. 100% My fault, i’m here to humbly ask if there’s any way to undo my idiocy.
Original directories /home/valheim/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim /opt/valheim
Order of operations
cp /opt/valheim /opt/valheim-bak
mkdir /opt/valheim/savedir
mv /home/valheim/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/* /opt/valheim/savedir/ (my fault I didn’t cp)
Things happened went to restore bakcup
rm -rf /opt/valheim
cp /opt/valheim-bak /opt/valheim
and it’s at this point I realized I was screwed because my world was gone and I realized that I didn’t make savedir part of the backup.
so now I’ve got /opt/valheim that doesn’t have the /opt/valheim/savedir directory inside it, and that’s what I’m trying to recover.
Environment:
OS: Ubuntu Server LTS 20.04
Drive format: ext4
I’ve already unmounted the drive, and mounted it as read-only within a Ubuntu Live-boot session, as well as another drive for r/w recovery purposes. I’ve tried running extundelete, ext4magic, & photorec, but none of them are coming up with any recovered files under /opt/valheim/savedir.
Is there any hope of recovery or did I just perform ragnarok on my data?
that’s what I like about Linux, unfortunately I shot myself in the foot.
I updated the original steps for the omitted typo, yes, it was an rm -rf.
I sohuld not that ext4magic & photorec did find several things to recover, and some of them got dumped into generic filenames vs the original, I just can’t find anything under the specific path I was looking for.
Depending on the total diskspace in your /opt partition, you might get away with using http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/
ext4 always allocated new blocks on previously not used blocks if possible - this makes undeleting possible. (also makes ext4 a horrible bad filesystem for thin-provisioned filesystems… but, that’s besides the point)
You’ll need to use this tool from a rescue USB or similar, as extundelete requires the partition to be unmounted.
that’s my concern. before I unmounted, that step 6 has me worried that I overwrite the data, even though there was plenty of free space on drive. My distant hope is that when it did the copy, it used new sectors to store the data, and didn’t overwrite the old sectors, I just need a way to get to those old sectors. (phrasing, not 100% sure on sector terminology)
TestDisk is a great suggestion. If that doesn’t work, there’s a few others you can try, but as long as you don’t write to that disk, there’s a very strong likelihood you can recover your data.
I would pull the drive, make an exact copy of it, then keep your original disk powered off somewhere safe until you can recover the data and make a backup IMMEDIATELY. Having 1 copy of your data is the same as having none. Drives fail. Good luck in your recovery, sir!
It was a totally different use case, an SD card that went bad for unkmown reasons and demanded it be formatted before it could be used in any way, but a quick format to make it actually mountable and PhotoRec got just about everything back from it, a lot more than I was expecting.
Worth a shot, it has a Linux version, I could not get it to work there as I am not a regular Linux used for more then a decade but the windows version worked perfectly.
Testdisk has saved me a few times, and it is a nice tool to have in your back pocket. I would also follow @harrypnyce advice and make a back up of your drive. So you can perform all the recovery on the copy and not risk the Original.
so attempting to run TestDisk via the guide linked, and when I attempt to list files following the guide linked, i’m getting a "Support for this filesystem wasn’t enabled during compilation.
The drive is a linux LVM drive (default options with Ubuntu LTS Server). root@ubuntu-server:/mnt/new-drive/testdisk# pvdisplay --- Physical volume --- - Pastebin.com *display output
I’m doing some research now, but any quick answers to getting testdisk to properly read the partition on /dev/sda? photorec didn’t have an issue, so I know it’s something I’m doing/not doing or option I’m selecting within testdisk.
What partition are you attempting to scan? Difficult for us to know what options you’ve followed. Hopefully your file system isn’t damaged (or encrypted). What partition are you trying to scan, /dev/sda2 ?
Disk /dev/sda: 500 GiB, 536870912000 bytes, 1048576000 sectors
Disk model: Virtual disk
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 08028048-C028-4793-9CB7-9670BE10C2D8
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 4095 2048 1M BIOS boot
/dev/sda2 4096 2101247 2097152 1G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda3 2101248 1048573951 1046472704 499G Linux filesystem
Disk /dev/sdb: 500 GiB, 536870912000 bytes, 1048576000 sectors
Disk model: Virtual disk
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 3EF443DB-025B-4ECE-AEBF-6E61D87187E0
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sdb1 2048 976562175 976560128 465.7G Linux filesystem
Disk /dev/sdc: 500 GiB, 536870912000 bytes, 1048576000 sectors
Disk model: Virtual disk
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 08028048-C028-4793-9CB7-9670BE10C2D8
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sdc1 2048 4095 2048 1M BIOS boot
/dev/sdc2 4096 2101247 2097152 1G Linux filesystem
/dev/sdc3 2101248 1048573951 1046472704 499G Linux filesystem
root@ubuntu-server:~# pvdisplay
WARNING: Not using device /dev/sdc3 for PV 0yQ7Vy-1CYb-PyVC-O8yr-xCQZ-8mxK-vFcVfz.
WARNING: PV 0yQ7Vy-1CYb-PyVC-O8yr-xCQZ-8mxK-vFcVfz prefers device /dev/sda3 because device name matches previous.
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sda3
VG Name ubuntu-vg
PV Size <499.00 GiB / not usable 0
Allocatable yes
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 127743
Free PE 76543
Allocated PE 51200
PV UUID 0yQ7Vy-1CYb-PyVC-O8yr-xCQZ-8mxK-vFcVfz
root@ubuntu-server:~# vgdisplay
WARNING: Not using device /dev/sdc3 for PV 0yQ7Vy-1CYb-PyVC-O8yr-xCQZ-8mxK-vFcVfz.
WARNING: PV 0yQ7Vy-1CYb-PyVC-O8yr-xCQZ-8mxK-vFcVfz prefers device /dev/sda3 because device name matches previous.
--- Volume group ---
VG Name ubuntu-vg
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 2
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 1
Open LV 0
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size <499.00 GiB
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 127743
Alloc PE / Size 51200 / 200.00 GiB
Free PE / Size 76543 / <299.00 GiB
VG UUID eDMQDs-qD2R-X1kv-caVi-ZxLY-ZhE3-3U8dik
root@ubuntu-server:~# lvdisplay
WARNING: Not using device /dev/sdc3 for PV 0yQ7Vy-1CYb-PyVC-O8yr-xCQZ-8mxK-vFcVfz.
WARNING: PV 0yQ7Vy-1CYb-PyVC-O8yr-xCQZ-8mxK-vFcVfz prefers device /dev/sda3 because device name matches previous.
--- Logical volume ---
LV Path /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv
LV Name ubuntu-lv
VG Name ubuntu-vg
LV UUID eNqLRN-oiML-k30M-mSQp-AQpS-R1Pp-q741Pb
LV Write Access read/write
LV Creation host, time ubuntu-server, 2021-02-15 21:06:08 +0000
LV Status NOT available
LV Size 200.00 GiB
Current LE 51200
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
of note, the drive I’m working with is /dev/sdc. /dev/sda is the original, /dev/sdc is the dd copy of /dev/sda, and /dev/sdb is a misc r/w drive i’m using to mess with while I recover data from /dev/sdc
so apparently testdisk doesn’t work with ext4 or LVM filesytems. photorec was able to read the filesystem, but then came the part of having to figure out which recovered files were the ones I was looking for. Through some help on another subreddit, they were able to give me a hex file signature that I was able to add a custom signature for photorec to look for. After letting photorec scan the drive with the new targeted signatures, it was able to find the necessary files and restore my data. Backups are now in place!
Thank you to the people here pointing me towards testdisk & photrec as those definitely helped the recovery process.
