Recovering from Linux Hard Drive Disasters

Half Day Morning
(9:00 am-12:30 pm)

Thurgood Marshall North Ballroom

Linux
T4
Theodore Ts'o, Google
Description: 

Ever had a hard drive fail? Ever kick yourself because you didn't keep backups of critical files, or you discovered that your regularly nightly backup didn't succeed?

Of course not: everybody keeps regular backups and verifies them to make sure they are successful. But for those people who think they might nevertheless someday need this information, this tutorial will discuss ways of recovering from storage disasters caused by failures somewhere in the hardware or software stack.

Who should attend: 

Linux system administrators and users.

Take back to work: 

How to recover from storage disasters caused by failures somewhere in the hardware or software stack.

Topics include: 
  • How data is stored on hard drives
  • Recovering from a corrupted partition table
  • Recovering from failed software RAID systems
  • Low-level techniques to recover data from a corrupted ext2/3/4 filesystem when backups aren't available
  • Using e2image to back up critical ext2/3/4 filesystem metadata
  • Using e2fsck and debugfs to sift through a corrupted filesystem
  • Preventive measures to avoid needing to use heroic measures