Wrote image file to wrong disk

[Wanderlei]

I accidentally wrote a R-Pi image to the wrong disk and I lost heaps of stuff. Anyone know how I can recover from this?

[Wanderlei]

I feel sick in the stomach.

I am hoping most of the data is there, most of the 2TB is unallocated and only the first few gigs were over written. I just dont think I have the skills to recover from this.

[thsBavR10]

Maybe photorec (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec) or TestDisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) ?
Have a look on it.

[Wanderlei]

Cheers mate, I went panic stations full blast and got a bunch of recovery tools and had bunch running at the same time.

I then had a few valium.

I think my best bet is partition recovery. I killed of the scans I had running and started the one I thought was best, 'Active Partition Recovery'.

Some slight hope, I am running a super scan which is gonna take a nail biting 4 or 5 hours. But I notice it knows the original name of the hdd before it was wiped.

The drive had a good 5+ years worth of hording on it, so much stuff. All because I started buggering around try new imaging software because I was being lazy about imaging sd cards of different sizes.

I am just really out of my depth, I think you need to know how to hex edit partition tables, etc or you are at the mercy of recovery tools and hope they come through for you.

[pjc123]

Why don't you just revert to your most recent backup? Oh yes, of course I know the answer to that.....What backups?

[Wanderlei]

I am pretty sure I have pulled of successful recover, I am pretty wasted at this point but I think I have success. Copy most import data to another drive passing out after drinking and benzos. Finish recover tomorrow befoer I break any things else.

So many bricks were shat but I think I survive it, big lessons learnt.

I thinking diskchk etc tomorrow to make sure everything is solid.

[itimpi]

I am pretty sure I have pulled of successful recover, I am pretty wasted at this point but I think I have success. Copy most import data to another drive passing out after drinking and benzos. Finish recover tomorrow befoer I break any things else.

So many bricks were shat but I think I survive it, big lessons learnt.

I thinking diskchk etc tomorrow to make sure everything is solid.

Well you will have lost whatever data was in the part of the disk that was over-written when you wrote out the image, but from what you say it sounds like you have probably recovered the vast majority of the data? Well done!

[Dweeber]

So many bricks were shat but I think I survive it, big lessons learnt.

You didn't learn anything if you are not going to setup a backup solution next.

Seriously 5+ years of anything important needs a backup. Life's going to throw you curve balls when you least expect it... someone comes in and takes your computer, fire, water damage, disk dies, electrical damage, you overwrite it ... other things you never thought of... Aliens, Kid (can be considered Aliens)...

[Wanderlei]

So many bricks were shat but I think I survive it, big lessons learnt.

You didn't learn anything if you are not going to setup a backup solution next.

Seriously 5+ years of anything important needs a backup. Life's going to throw you curve balls when you least expect it... someone comes in and takes your computer, fire, water damage, disk dies, electrical damage, you overwrite it ... other things you never thought of... Aliens, Kid (can be considered Aliens)...

What makes you think I haven't gone backup crazy? I have bought so many hard drives expect the price to rise like there was floods in Thailand.

[Dweeber]

So many bricks were shat but I think I survive it, big lessons learnt.

You didn't learn anything if you are not going to setup a backup solution next.

Seriously 5+ years of anything important needs a backup. Life's going to throw you curve balls when you least expect it... someone comes in and takes your computer, fire, water damage, disk dies, electrical damage, you overwrite it ... other things you never thought of... Aliens, Kid (can be considered Aliens)...

What makes you think I haven't gone backup crazy? I have bought so many hard drives expect the price to rise like there was floods in Thailand.

Thats good to know. Normally, people don't start to act (if they ever do), until after they have lost data.

Not all backup solutions require hard drives on your part. If you have an external network presence, you might set up something that syncs important data to a remote location securely. This protects against a problem at your house/office where your data is destroyed.

There are services that you can use for this as well.

The second most important part is to test your new backup strategy to make sure you can actually restore what it is you are backing up. Big FAIL when you need to restore and find your backups can't be restored because you never tested.