Please tell me that Timeshift hides the other images somewhere after it does a "restore"...

I just needed to shift back my root directory a couple of days and it restored JUST my root directory... as in NOTHING ELSE IS THERE!!!! It wiped my second HDD as well which had MANY MANY MANY important docs, my business paperwork, files, tax info, divorce stuff.... PLEASE tell me there is something I can do about this....


Why in the HELL did it decide to wipe that second drive?!?!?!?!!? I don't like programs touching that drive for any reason.

I am not in the mood to answer dumb questions like "did you have that drive backed up anywhere else". We can all do math....

Is the drive that got wiped NTFS. Timeshift is not compatible with NTFS partitions. I'd try photorec/testdisk to rescue the data. If it's a Linux filesystem, then you could use foremost.

No, nothing was NTFS. I had it all ext4. What can I do? I am willing to try anything...

do you think there is a way to recover any of the three snapshots?

Let's guess you're talking about Mint - Clem blogged a while back about the introduction of timeshift as a system restore snapshot tool as an companion to the normal "user data" backup.. I haven't looked at it, but I'm guessing that's what it is. I also believe it can be extended to do other data.

How did you erase the other disk - I've had to use photorec in the last couple of weeks after Win10 upgrade destroyed itself. Got photos, videos, text files back (it works on Linux filesystems too).

Yes- sorry, running on Mint Cinnamon. I had it backing up everything keeping three snapshots on hand, backed up daily.

How and WHY the other disk wiped itself i beyond me. That's the thing that throws me for a loop...

I am running TestDisk right now and copying the files to an external drive. I am going to run Photorec after TestDisk and do the same. So far I have 1,685,944 copied with 82 failed. It will probably run all night at this pace. Hopefully (fingers crossed) that PhotoRec will be able to recover the files that TestDisk can't.

All in all I have learned A LOT tonight about depending on a single backup. What drives me crazy was last night I started figuring out how to automatically copy my snapshots and throw them on my Nextcloud server. If I would of gotten it done last night, I wouldn't be where I am at now. Hopefully it all works out though and I get my files back, too many important files that can never be replaced.

~T

TestDisk just finished. It found all my folders but they were all empty when I opened them. I am running PhotoRec and already I am pretty impressed. It's giving me a 1hr 45min estimate. That's pretty cool! I just hope it works above all. If it doesn't I will throw in a live cd and try it that way.

I will document this for reference for anyone else that is in my situation. Hopefully we get some positive results...

~T

Ahh - I read "It wiped my second HDD as well" as "I wiped my second HDD as well", so I thought you had (deliberately ?) erased it yourself. I found photrec worked best if I specified particular filetypes rather than let it do everything.
I did photos (jpeg, Nikon raw) first then videos, then docs, then png (gazillions on a Win10 system - I didn't even look at them).
This enabled me to parse the recovery directories more easily and target what I was really interested in.

Crap- well I guess I will be doing this multiple times then.... I wish I would of thought of that from the start, it makes much more sense.

Here's another one for your "oh crap" file.

As you are bringing files back to life, your (supposedly) background indexer will jump in and start doing its work. Tracker was firing off threads all over the place. On this day-to-day system I don't allow it to run, but on the laptop I was using it was enabled. PITA.

I personally recommend that you do not touch your system in the meantime and that you create an Issue at:

https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift/issues

Before trying to restore data to this extent, it is always wise to make a complete image of the disk in question (particularly if the disk is failing, which doesn't appear to be the case for you), or at least ensure that you only have read access to the device - you don't want to make things worse by writing to that disk in any way whatsoever.

Yes I agree. I was up until 5 am working and researching every option. What I ended up doing this morning is opening up the case and unplugging the power and SATA cable to the drive. My main SSD drive isn't an issue as the information on there isn't a huge deal. I will wipe the SSD and install a fresh copy of my OS (Mint) and get all my security and network settings the way I like them. I feel "naked" running the OS with no extra security.

The drive I am really worried about is 500gb and other than my server drive, I don't have another drive equal or greater in size (that has enough free space). The important stuff is only about 300gb in size, however, the way I understand it, I need to image the entire drive in it's current state to create a safe copy to try and pull data from.

I ram TestDisk and PhotoRec last night/this morning and was able to recover about 40 thousand photos and about 1100 pdf's. It was picking up the same file at least twice from what I observed. As suggested above it's far easier to pull one or a couple of extensions at a time. It can overwhelm you quick if you try to do too much. As far as I understand these programs (TestDisk & PhotoRec) do not write any data and only copy data it pulls to an outside source. I would feel better (safer) working with a copied image rather than the real deal though.

Well, I am going to wipe this SSD and get my main OS back up and running (correctly). I might even go ahead and switch to XFCE on this computer since I have been putting it off for a few months.

Now that I am getting over the heartache of all of this, the learning points I can take away is-

1. Make backups of your backups, sync backups with your server as well (where's that emoji that's beating his head against the wall?).
2. Don't rely on just one backup program for your important data.
3. As cheap as HDD's have gotten, invest in another physical drive for JUST backup images.

Well off to reinstall!

~T

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If the data is only stored in one place, even if it's an external drive, it's not backed up. For there to be a back-up there has to be two copies of whatever it is!

Thank you AM. Yes, I should of made that clearer- THe secondary drive had the snapshots from my main drive and I also had files and folders copied onto the secondary drive that I used pretty often. My thinking was if a snapshot was to fail at least I still had a copy of the actual file and folder. I never counted on something like this though... I am still trying to think of a better way. I am wondering about having two programs that took snapshots and each backed up on two separate drives. So if I had Timeshift and a backup program called "dummy". Both Timeshift and Dummy are taking snaps of the same thing and backing them up on two devices. I would use my secondary HDD and also configure my NextCloud to pick up the new images when they post. Would that be a better way? I have been stewing about this all day as I have been getting my system all setup to the way it was.

Thanks!

~T

I'm not a great fan of the cloud, nor of automatic backups as the main data backup mechanism (if something goes wrong on device A then the problem will be replicated onto device B). For me, manual imaging or backing up on to an external device is the way to go. That way I can see what's going on when I do it and keep that device stored separately. You shouldn't rely on backups to another device on the same physical computer.