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Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

[solved] Recover files from NTFS partition

Hello everyone,

after I used gcp (a tool similar to cp, but "feature rich") to copy a few folders to another folder, there are only the recently copied files left, the other files that folder contained before are gone.

I have the following in my .bashrc:

export VIDEOINCO="/home/awebb/Multimedia/Video/#Inco"

The following sym link is present (maybe it's relevant):

/home/awebb/Multimedia/Video/ -> /media/hdd2/Video 

That means the real target path is:

/media/hdd2/Video/#Inco

Since it's an artifact from my Windows years, the file system is NTFS.

I tried to copy all files and folders from /home/awebb/downloads to my video-to-do folder using the following command:

gcp -r * $VIDEOINCO

Now all the files in the folder $VIDEOINCO are gone, only the ones I copied with the command above are there.

I tried to reproduce what happened. I simulated the same environment in /tmp and a different folder on that HDD, with and without symlinks, with cp and gcp, but everything seems to be normal right now. I also checked the HDD, file system seems to be ok. I even tried to use folder names with and without "#", I can't reproduce the error. I also searched for known bugs in gcp, but I could not find any information about that issue.

I'm currently running TestDisk to see if I can rescue some of the files.

Now... the actual question (it's about time, huh?): Did I miss something? Has anyone encountered such a phenomenon and knows what happened so I can avoid it in the future? Did I screw up at any point using * or not using a final / after the folder name? Any insight would be appreciated.

## UPDATE ##

TestDisk did not find any deleted files. The files are simply gone. I changed the thread title.

Does anyone know something besides TestDisk that might help me rescuing those files? When it comes to rescue software, search engines seem to be slaves to commercial software that does not work :-(

Last edited by Awebb (2011-02-25 01:25:01)

olive

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2008-06-22

Posts: 1,490

Re: [solved] Recover files from NTFS partition

There is also ntfsundelete (belonging to ntfsprogs)

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

Re: [solved] Recover files from NTFS partition

Yes, that's what I was looking for. It appears to be that all I need to solve this is a good night of sleep.

I already recovered about half of the lost files. Thanks for the hint.

Marked as solved.

### UPDATE ###

I managed to recover about 500 GiB, that is even more than I lost in the process. The only files that are gone are some tempfiles from processing videos.

@olive: Thanks again for the hint! *thumbsup*

Last edited by Awebb (2011-02-25 12:51:51)