I was working on a project (or 3) at school. The files were stored on a server with some RAID setup (I think it was RAID 5, but not certain). They had a disk failure. While installing the new disk, there was a second disk failure. Woo hoo. They weren't backing up the data in any other way (even though they do so on other machines... woulda been nice to know they weren't backing up).

I don't know all that much about RAID or recovery from crashes, but essentially what we have been told is that there is a big lost+found directory where all of the recovered files live. Most don't have file names anymore, just inode numbers. But they told us that the ownership information was still intact, so we could do a massive "find" command using our userid in that directory to find any recovered files. I've done that and come up virtually blank (I only get a few html files that look like 'help' files from a software package I had installed) along with a bunch of "permission denied" messages on what I assume are directories I'm not allowed to search (again, they are just inode numbers).

My question is this: is it possible that some of the files lost their ownership information or had their permissions messed up? I'd like to know if it is worthwhile asking for the administrator to change the permissions on everything and allow me to do a grep for some keywords I'd expect to find in some of my more important files? Some other users have been successful in finding many of their files, so I think after some time, everyone who wanted to get their stuff off that machine will have had time to do so. The school won't spring for professional recovery (they said it would be over $10K).

I'll provide further information if it is helpful. Any advice appreciated... help me save a few months work!

The fact that others are finding their stuff doesn't bode well for you, does it? I doubt that the ownership or permissions were changed when the inodes were dumped into lost+found, but someone else may correct me on this. If you have a file that you are particularly concerned about finding, you might ask your admin to do a search. But, I'd strongly caution against doing a blanket change of ownership of what's in lost+found. That's an exposure that the admin doesn't want, plus it pretty much eliminates everyone else's ability to find their files.

Ask the admin to search for keywords from one or two of your files. It's not likely they'll be found, but it's worth trying.