How shift+del ruined my morning
What I learned today? The importance of backups, and having a clear head when working on my system. Tuesday night, I am going home to Connecticut for the summer, so I started saving all my data to an external hard drive to take with me. Well, I also did a little spring cleaning at the same time and accidentally did a "shift+up+del" (which selected the directory above as well as the one I wanted) and wiped out a 30GB directory full of rare documentaries I had acquired over the years. For those who don't know, on Windows, "shift+del" bypasses the Recycle Bin. Stupidly, I pressed enter to confirm deletion.
At first I wasn't sure what got deleted, but I knew I deleted something more than I was supposed too. Check the recycle bin, nothing.. "Oh shit..." I quickly IM a couple friends and ask them what I should do. One of them points me to a really "nice" CD full of hard disk maintenance and recovery tools.
Using Active UNDELETE, I was able to restore everything except for one 700MB file. At the time I deleted the files, I was also bzipping a tar file, which probably overwrote the space that file was located and thus made it unrecoverable.
What was supposed to take only 15 minutes turned into an entire morning ordeal. A hard lesson is a lesson learned. I hope somebody gets something out of this post...
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