[ale] File recovery

[JD]

Guess this is why I make a terrible admin.
I would have said - "it is gone" at the very beginning and been done with it.

I was an admin 15 yrs ago at a little company.  Each team was responsible for
doing their own backups. We were a C/C++ cross-platform development shop, so
most teams just used the fact that their members would check out the code from
the VCS onto 3-15 desktops and be done. My team survived a few failures/file
corruption issues.  I'd burn a CD with the source code once a month and take it
home. We were fine.

Another team was a single person working on a dedicated AIX machine. The HDD
crashed. All his work was toast since the last drop to the client about a month
earlier. I pulled out a signed paper where he accepted the responsibility to
back up his work and we were done.  Nobody was admin on that machine. It hadn't
been patched ... ever and didn't even have a mksysb run.  The developer had
"assumed" someone was handling it. He was 10 yrs my senior. I don't even know
how that box was put on the network or who did it.

Again, I felt bad, but didn't feel ANY responsibility.

On 01/06/2014 11:20 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> Excellent! That may save an svn repo
> 
> On Jan 6, 2014 10:31 AM, "Ed Cashin" <ecashin at noserose.net
> <mailto:ecashin at noserose.net>> wrote:
> 
>     Well, if you're lucky enough that the new install is smaller than the
>     old one, and the VM disk images happened to be past the point that the
>     new install wrote on the disk, and if you're lucky enough for the VM
>     images to be physically contiguous on the disk (thick provisioning
>     would probably make that the case), then you could scan for the magic
>     number of the VMware image in the block device itself and find the
>     beginnings of the images.  There's probably some metadata in the disk
>     image header that will tell you the size to copy out to a new file.
> 
>     Yes, Googling for VMware disk image magic found PDFs that have details
>     about reading the metadata.  I don't know if this link
>     (http://www.vmware.com/app/vmdk/?src=vmdk) will work for you, but the
>     vmdk_specs.pdf says,
> 
>       magicNumber is initialized with
> 
>       #define SPARSE_MAGICNUMBER 0x564d444b /* 'V' 'M' 'D' 'K' */
> 
>     ... and it has info on interpreting that particular version of the
>     disk image format.
> 
>     Good luck.