MAKE A BACKUP

[james]

Sorry for the block capitals but I have just spent two days restoring some of my music on the computer.
I deleted 90Ggyes of data (which would be about 300 albums) by accident (I started running a command and found I was in the wrong directory).
I could have re-ripped the albums .. (which would mean finding them in various boxes and would take forever)
But I had a backup.
(Unfortunately the backup was 6-months old and I had to redo all the edits I had made to metadata I had done in the last 6montths)
But quicker than re-ripping 300 CD's.
Still took me 2 days.

So have a backup and make sure it is current.

[hudo]

Just FYI, if this happens to somebody else ...
Delete usually just removes entries from FAT - file allocation table, doesn't actually remove content from the disk, so there are many tools to return those data. Doesn't work if something else is written over that data, which is possible, so its best not do to anything with that disk until you get "undelete" tool on USB stick.

[james]

Just FYI, if this happens to somebody else ...
Delete usually just removes entries from FAT - file allocation table, doesn't actually remove content from the disk, so there are many tools to return those data. Doesn't work if something else is written over that data, which is possible, so its best not do to anything with that disk until you get "undelete" tool on USB stick.

Unfortunately that was not an option since the files were stored on a QNAP server which uses some sort of linux file system.

[Fran]

best to differential backups over 3 hard drives with duplications across at least 2 - and and offsite storage would also be a good idea

Sounds mad I know, but a hdd failure is a "when" and not an "if" situation.

[hudo]

Unfortunately that was not an option since the files were stored on a QNAP server which uses some sort of linux file system.

Its still some linux file system, and i am sure there are undelete tools on linux also. Just requires a bit more work (pulling hdd out of nas, connecting it to PC, download VM with Linux, mount drive, find undelete tool ...)

[james]

Unfortunately that was not an option since the files were stored on a QNAP server which uses some sort of linux file system.

Its still some linux file system, and i am sure there are undelete tools on linux also. Just requires a bit more work (pulling hdd out of nas, connecting it to PC, download VM with Linux, mount drive, find undelete tool ...)

I had a look at Linux un-delete tools and they look quite complicated to use. In any case I got everything back because I had a backup.

https://itsfoss.com/recover-deleted-files-linux/