How to recover lost files after you accidentally wipe your hard drive
Recently I wanted to make sure I had enough space to back up my home digital videos and pictures, so I purchased a new hard drive to add to my home Linux server. I moved all the files I wanted to save onto a single hard drive and repartitioned the old hard drive so I could upgrade to a newer version of Linux. After going through the process of reinstalling the operating system, I mounted the backup hard drive and discovered that it was empty. I had some how mixed up the hard drive I used to back up all the data with a hard drive that I wanted to wipe. Because I had done such a poor job of retaining backups on external media, I did not have any backups of my pictures and videos.
By: Shawn Hermans
Possible setups for recovery include:
- Recover the files to a separate hard drive.
- Recover the files to a networked storage drive.
- Recover the files to a separate partition on the same hard drive.
- Image the hard drive using a tool like ddrescue and recover files using only one partition.