I'm depressed.

I had an old machine, with win98, linux, winXP and a couple of fat32 ~6gig partitions. Just the other day I took the linux partition of with partimage, stuck it on a fresh drive. Then a few days later I blatted the old drive completely, took off all the partitions, made a ext3 linux partition, a small swap and the rest ext3 for home.

Then, just now I remembered it had 3 years worth of Videos of me and my family on...boo hoo. The dangers of digital media.

So, is there _any_ way of getting my data back.

I think I may commit suicide if not...I'm getting my noose ready now...


Oh god, why was I so stooopid??


I reckon, the home directory could contain the avi files but it was FAT32, now it's something completely different - so am I doomed?

First of all, stop using the drive. Don't boot it, or use it for anything or you might overwrite some of your data. Chances are, a lot of it is still there.

Then use Photorec.

Basically here's what you should do:
1) Take the drive and stick it in another system.
2) Boot the other system and mount the drive Read-only
3) Run photorec (I usually only do a few file types per run, otherwise it takes forever), make sure that the files are being written to the other system, not the drive you're recovering files from.
4) Browse through and see what you got back. You'll get everything from all the OS's including internet cache.

Thanks for that help - but I've just discovered I DID back it all up onto my server (subconciously I must have known that). It wasn't on one of my nfs shares so I didn't come across it straight away.

Phew that was a close one.

Now, how to back up hours and hours of footage in a durable format?

I would be happier if it was all on VHS...

Thanks though, that photorec is noted now. I'm amazed this is possible even on a formated drive...

I might try it anyway, just to see what would've happened.

The neat thing about regular formatted drives is that the data isn't erased. It's just marked as "available" space to write to. So as long as your installation doesn't overwrite that particular block with data, the data is still there, just not recognized.

That's why I told you about the internet cache thing. I told someone else that and they didn't believe me when I was trying to recover their family photos. Turns out someone was accessing a LOT of porn. I think her son got in a lot of trouble...

EDIT: Also, just FYI, if you want to securely delete your drives, like before selling a computer, use a tool like DBAN or shred from a LiveCD. They overwrite the drive with random data several times, basically wiping out everything there is.

What's durable - even the oxides on tape degrade.
The march of technology demands *ALL* data be regularly recopied to newer format media. Else how are you going to read it in 10 years time ???.
Has the side benefit of multiple persistent archive copies.

Copy your data to DVD - in a few years redo it to Bluray/HD-DVD/... whatever is in vouge.
Rinse and repeat ...

I fully understand the need to move to newer formats. The point I was making with VHS is that it is analogue, so even if it does degrade it is still watchable. I have VHS tapes that are over 20 years old, that still seem to look as good (or crap depending on to what you compare) as they did all that time ago. And they haven't been stored correctly. I don't reckon I could say the same with writable DVD's and CD's - they seem MUCH more fragile.