[NBLUG/talk] Recovering data from a failing hard disk

[mrp]

Lincoln Peters wrote:
> > I still wonder why the same 94GB of data on /old (minus the 12 damaged
> > files), although unmodified, occupy 170GB on the /new.  Although 65GB
> > are still available on /new, so I'm under no pressure to figure this out
> > any time soon.

Kyle Rankin replied:
> Sounds like possibly symlinks were copied as real files or something, so
> you ended up having multiple copies of a file instead of symlinks to a
> single copy (maybe the same thing with hard links too).

I was pretty sure that cpio "Does The Right Thing" with symlinks unless
you specify the "-l" option... maybe I'm wrong.

It's also possible that I was wrong about it knowing what to do with
sparse files (where the blocks used aren't continuous in the address
space of the file... pretty common with database files).  Now that I
think about it.. it's very difficult for user space programs to
DTRT with sparse files... so that seems a likely candidate.

Something to try: do a 'du -k' on both old and new to see where the
disk usage discrepencies lie.

  -- Mitch