Sorry about your files, I'll point out one mistake you did, that I see so often. A lot of people seem to backup to the same tape/disk/media every time they do a backup. I always ask them, what happens if in the middle of that backup, you system dies. You are now left with a dead system and an incomplete backup, you just overwrote you good backup killing it when the system died. You should always rotate your backup media, just so this kind of thing doesn't happen. I know it doesn't help now, but I'm sure you'll never let it happen again. One thought about your lost data, is it possible you forgot to mount your USB drive, so could you backups have gone into /media/320GB/naubrey/ on the original drive ??? Hopefully. -----Original Message----- From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Nathan England Sent: Monday, September 07, 2009 7:34 PM To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us Subject: rsync and deleted files I plugged my USB drive into my system, ran my backup script and went to supper. My backup script contains rsync -avz --delete-after /home/naubrey/ /media/320GB/naubrey/ Usually, it works great. Problem is my /home/naubrey/ directory on my system was EMPTY and it wiped out my backup!!!! I just wiped my work laptop and reinstalled, but I had not copied my user directory stuff back because I needed to make some additional changes. I made the changes and wanted to back up the changes, forgetting my user directory was included in my all_inclusive backup script... The USB drive is ext2 and when I came back I immediately unmounted and mounted ro. This is a typical user directory with 60GB of text files, abiword files, kword files, OpenOffice files, mp3, ogg, about 100 avi dvds, and thousands of notes... Some files were only 2 k others were over 1GB. As I have never attempted recovery of deleted files because I am (99% of the time) very vigilante about my backups. I design backup systems for customers!!!! ha ha What utilities or programs are there that might automate this as I really don't care to sit and tell the system to recover this inode, and yes, this inode, and again y to this inode as there are well over 200,000 files. Thanks for any help, insights, condolences!!! nathan --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss