On Thursday 06 Mar 2014 23:10:32 C A Wills wrote: > Last night I tried to finish one thing that wee could not do while Terry > was with me, but that has raised another problem!! > > While sorting the the network out another 'User' was created called > 'Comment', why & how don't know; it did not appear to have any reason or > affect on/to what we were doing and we agreed I could delete it later. > Much later I checked that all was well, I could see all the network and > was pleased. > I then deleted the bogus 'User' and carried on with a game of Marjonng. > A little later before closing down I checked my emails - no emails, no > account, no Thunderbird only the calendar; no tool bars, no address > book, nothing. So I closed down Thunderbird and checked my files - > nothing. My 'Home' directory is completely empty! Checking login and the > picture is not my default but the one the 'Comments' user had, although > my usual login password logged me into this empty area! > > Any ideas as to what has happened please and is it possible to get back > my original 'Home' directory? I have not booted the laptop up since > this happened and not saved any files since Terry left.
The only thing I can think of is that the user 'Comment' was added by Gadmin when we were trying to get the shares to export. If you recall, we couldn't get it to work with samba-config, so we tried Gadmin. The user comment certainly appeared after we did that. At the time, I thought Gadmin was trying to set up users that it would recognise from the network. I think what actually happened is that Gadmin added a new user called 'Comment', but used the 'Clive' home directory (how dumb is that). When you subsequently deleted the Comment user account, the home directory was also deleted. All is not lost. When I managed to reformat the wrong partition a couple of months ago (/home instead of /), I got almost everything back using PhotoRec. Have a look at this link: http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/storage/survive-the-zombie-apocalypse-recover-lost-data-on-linux-1126690 which tells you a lot about recovery from disasters. Photorec is covered about halfway through the article. Also, it's worth downloading the 'Redo Backup and Restore' Live Disc (http://redobackup.org/download.php) also mentioned in the article. I didn't use this since I forgot it had a file recover feature, but when my company laptop died while I was working in the Hebrides, it allowed me to access my data and get online to send/receive emails until I got back to base. One thing. It is best to use the machine as little as possible until you have recovered your files, to avoid them being overwritten. -- Terry Coles -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2014-04-01 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:[email protected] How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
