[TriLUG] Data vanished from a partition?

[William Sutton via TriLUG]

Of curiosity, if you unmount /home, does the data show up (e.g., did it 
get put on the mount point rather than the /home filesystem, and is now 
being masked by the mounted filesystem)?

William Sutton

On Sat, 8 Aug 2015, Tom Bryan via TriLUG wrote:

> I'm hoping that someone has some suggestions because my search fu has
> utterly failed me on this one.
>
> My wife's laptop runs KUbuntu 14.04.  When she rebooted and logged in
> earlier this week, none of her files were there.  At first, I just
> assumed that the home partition, /dev/sda7, simply wasn't mounted.  I
> found that the partition *was* mounted, but it was apparently empty.
> It still has a filesystem on it.  Since she has an account on the box,
> KDE helpfully created a new home directory with the normal default
> files and folders when she logged in.  And those files persisted just
> fine.
>
> I haven't been able to find any big errors in the logs or anything.
> It's like someone did a /bin/rm -rf /home/*.  So, I now have a
> partition that looks like a normal ext-4 partition.  It no longer has
> any of the files that it had last week.  It also has the new skeleton
> of a home directory that KDE just created.
>
> I've seen hard drives get flaky and start to lose data or fail to
> mount.  But I've never seen anything like this.  Basically, everything
> was there when she shut down.  When she started the machine up an hour
> later, it was all gone.
>
> And, of course, I did something that broke automated back ups months
> ago.  I'm really hoping that someone has some suggestions here.  :-(
> Has anyone ever seen anything like this?  Other than running fsck on
> the partition from a LiveCD, does anyone have any suggestions?
>
> ---Tom
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