The value of being careful

I tend to unplug devices I’m not working on. Are there not recovery tools for NFS?

A quick Google shows that specific tools exist but the better ones probably cost money. I’m sure Dan has investigated these so the only reminder I would give would be to emphasise the importance of doing a full bit copy of the disk before trying to recover it. Failed recoveries can really screw things up beyond repair.

Don’t forget this is NFS not NTFS.

An example of duplicates it will find is if you ever use save as instead of save. The old versions will be recovered going back many generations.

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

For those who may not know “save” appends changes to the end of an existing but “save as” writes out a whole new file incorporating the changes. The new file will take up less space than the old one with changes added.

+1 – If working on a large and/or complex document, I always use ‘Save As’.

Still worth a go if you have no backups ?

It’s like saying put petrol in a diesel car as it’s all fuel, it won’t work. Even if you’ve mounted an NFS drive in Windows – which is an arcane art in itself –  as the filing structure is totally different. Recuva has nothing to work with.

Dan, can you make use of the snapshot function of NFS? Not something I’ve played with myself. At this level I chicken out and let Synology do it for me.

My latest NAS allows me to set up a Windows Domain (not of interest to you) but that also means it has the CPU power to use BTRFS which allows pooling, snapshots and checksums (self healing, no bit rot).  It also de-duplicates automatically, mine is running at about 2:1

The Active Backup Suite can deal with just about anything client wise and Hyper Backup (to backup the NAS) can be done to a local USB disk or the Synology C2 Cloud service – 1TB is £70 a year (you can get bigger and smaller plans).

All of my important data is now on a Synology NAS and I can just let it get on with it knowing that of there any glitches it will let me know. This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped using or experimenting with Linux, but having been in your situation more than once I decided that I couldn’t be any more.

EDIT – My mobile devices all have DS Photo installed to automatically backup photos when they see some WiFi (think your own personal Google Photos). Although they’re set up correctly, last week I had warning emails from my NAS that someone claiming to be me was logging in from Switzerland and then Italy. Nothing was blocked as the authorisations were correct but it’s reassuring to know that the NAS is always on the lookout for unusual activity. The email had a link to take me straight to my login, nice.  I could have set that warning up as an SMS via Clickatell too.