Data loss?

[vrep]

Hi all,

I've recently had a problem with my bubba2. It wasn't accessible anymore (ssh, telnet, web admin, afp, samba) and I couldn't get it to shut down properly. After a hard reset (unplug the power cord) I couldn't get it to boot anymore.

I was planning on reinstalling the system with a USB-stick, but now I've seen that there's less data on the disk than I would expect. Presuming that my expectations are correct , am I seeing not everything there's to see? I'm accessing the disk through a VMWare Fusion Ubuntu 13.10 client, mounting the disk with the lvm2 package (vgchange etc.).

Is there any possibility of restoring that data?
Can I check some logs to find out what happened?

Thanks for any advice!

[johannes]

worst case you have physical problems with your disk, and in that case it might go worse and worse, so try to do this effectively, without too much experimenting around (I know this is difficult though).

What do you mean that you don't see all data? there are three partitions, system, home and swap, where I assume your valuable stuff is in the home partition. This is an LVM partition. Can you see any data there?

[vrep]

Hi Johannes,

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I see most of my data. I'm relieved that most if not all data in the users directories is there. But, in the storage directory, I'm missing 50% or more of my data. I can't tell you exactly how much I'm missing as I don't know how much data there was before. For example: a couple of months ago I copied my complete music collection to my phone and it was around 33GB. Since then the collection has only grown, but is now a meagre 9GB. Luckily I have a backup of the music (although not 100%, but I'll survive). And the video folder doesn't contain much personal things. However, the pictures folder used to be filled with 40GB or more and is now only 10GB. And yes, you guessed it: that's where it could hurt the most. Even when I have an old backup of that folder.

Main point: what's going on? Even if I can't retrieve my data, I'd like to know if my disk is dying and needs to be replaced or that something else has happened.

[johannes]

Difficult to say without more information, but it sounds like your disk might be failing. Copy out your stuff immediately to save what you can (since you can see the data I assume you can also copy it out of there?)..