I lost data from ext3 and lost data due to xfs.
1. Ext3 was writing to a superblock (apperiently) when the power when out. POOF. Lost my /etc/ directory. All the files in it were fine, but they now had names like 1003213412. Reinstall.
2. XFS. My cat was leaning to far to see out the window. Saw a rabbit or bird and jumped (or something), fell down (of course), onto the back of my computer. Killed USB, my mouse stopped working. X didn't freeze but was unusable. Switched out of X shut ti down. Kernel oops.
rebooted.
Still no mouse light. Rebooted, powered the computer down pulled plug, hit the power to drain all the power out of the power supply and motherboard. Rebooted. Played with bios settings a bit and USB was back.
X wouldn't start. OK... not a good sign. GDM worked, but I couldn't log in and have it work.
Went to console, logged in.
That worked.
ls
<kernel gibberish.>
!!!?!?
ls
<kernel gibberish>
ls
<kernel gibberish>
cd /
ls
bin cdrom dvd floppy initrd lost+found opt proc sbin sys usr
boot dev etc home lib mnt root share tmp var
? OK.....
cd
ls
<kernel gibberish>
Oh.crap. Figured it out....
cd /
sudo su -
umount /home
xfs_check /dev/hdc1
What xfs_check said I didn't like reading.
xfs_repair /dev/hdc1
And on it went.
Found out my cat obliterated my "drag" directory. Everything got stuck in lost&found.
Everything was labeled 123123-type numbers. After their inode numbers I guess. However the directories themselves had lost their name, but the contents of those directories were fine.
So I went thru and manually renamed all the files and directories. Of coures I had no idea what the files were before they got obliterated. So I used vi and did a lot of searching thru binary files.
All 70Gigs of it. (of course by the time I was finished I was down to 48gigs with judicious trimming). Took like 6 hours (slow day at work though. which was nice. Renamed everything thru SSH)
Of course after all this was done my XFS filesystem was 80% fragmented. Oh, well. Didn't notice any difference, but I figured it was a good idea to start off with a clean plate. Copied everything over to another partition, reformated, and copied it back. Didn't even have to reboot once.
Stupid cat.