Backup and Incomplete Restore

It’s a pain to recover from a failing hard drive, even months after the fact. The hard drive in my Linux server (a laptop), started going bad in May or June. Since it was still under warranty, HP replaced it.

Before I sent the drive back to HP, I copied what I could recover from it, and I restored the other files from backup. Or at least, so I thought. Tonight, I discovered that my music collection is missing. The file folders are there, but the mp3 and vorbis files aren’t. Not a big deal, since I have the CDs, except for the few albums that I purchased as mp3s. “What else is missing?”, I wondered.

find $HOME/Photos -depth -type d -empty

It turns out that some of my photos are missing as well. It’s a good thing I didn’t delete my backups once I thought I’d completely restored from them.