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Recovering from Hard Drive Disasters
Tutorial
Ever had a hard drive fail? Ever kick yourself because you didn't keep backups of critical files, or you discovered that your regularly nightly backup didn't succeed?
Of course not: you keep regular backups and verify them frequently to make sure they are successful, right? But for those of you who think you might nevertheless someday need this information, this tutorial will discuss ways of recovering from hardware or software disasters.
Topics include:
- Low-level techniques to recover data from a corrupted ext2/ext3 filesystem when backups aren't available
- Using e2image to back up critical ext2/3 filesystem metadata
- Using e2fsck and debugfs to sift through a corrupted filesystem
- Some measures to avoid needing to use heroic measures
Theodore Ts'o
Theodore Ts'o (R7) has been a Linux kernel developer since almost the very beginnings of Linux: he implemented POSIX job control in the 0.10 Linux kernel. He is one of the maintainers of the ext2/ext3 filesystem, and is the primary author and maintainer of e2fsck and the rest of the ext2/ext3 userspace tools. Ted is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM's Linux Technology Center.
