Getting things back

After screwing up my drive cloning and wiping pretty much all my personal files, I’ve found (on my mobile phone of all places) around 80% of the music collection, the most important photos either dotted elsewhere on HDs, or on storage in cameras, and the video collection can be rebuilt with movies I actually like, rather than accumulated.

Now, since one of the drives that I screwed was my portable ArchLinux install, that was dead as well, and I was racking my brains figuring out how I did it first time round. I had a backup of that, but no amount of restoring would fix. Examining the backup, the file permissions all got screwed, and there was no way I was going to fix them all (again – I managed to screw up perms on my desktop and it took me forever to fix that).

Anyhoo, I learned that with some tinkering, VirtualBox can be coaxed into using a real drive, so off I went. I successfully installed the base system, and whilst still in VBox installed a desktop. It’s still a close to virgin xfce4 desktop, but hey, that’s just config.

Next was testing on a machine not on my network, so took it to work, and successfully booted my work machine from it, so all, good.

Finally, the important stuff; email and browser. Back at home, copied my TB and FF profile folders, and here I am with a fully usable system again. No worries about passwords etc. And using freefilesync, I can ensure that the portable Arch is up to date with passwords, email, etc. in a couple of minutes.

Over a month since the breakage, but almost fully back now.

Phew 🙂