Here I am at 2 am and there is an emergency email from a client. Went to the Mac and meddle with some files, trying to right some wrong. Feeling like a boss, I started deleting all the redundant files and fucking hell, I deleted the entire album of photos. From 2007 til 2011. All the photos gone.
I started sweating. Images of cigarettes appear in my head. I sat there stoned. Ok calm down. Solutions solutions.
Option 1// .trash Folder
I navigated to each folder and start looking for the deleted folders. Especially in the Trash can. Nothing there. /.trash folder is empty too. FML
Option 2// SSH
Ok ok. fine fine. I’ll just log in to the cPanel and give myself a SSH access. No login credentials were given for either. After trying a few times, holy moly I am in the cPanel. Fuck yea meme – I feel like a hacker. No time to gloat, SSH settings here we go.
Generate public keys.. private keys. I have done this before. but the instructions are swimming in front of me cuz I am too fucking stressed. Great. And what’s that search function for Terminal again. I can’t remember. Damn.
Option 3//Backups in cPanel
Not likely to work. Since it wasn’t set up and there are just daily and partial downloads. But wait.
I mouse over the Home Directory button, I saw a tar.gz file with a DATE attached to it. I pumped my fist in the air and copy the link, change the date to the day before and downloaded it.
While I waited, I look at the server administrator email and did a google to find out who is the fucker that owns the server whom folders I deleted. Somehow I feel like it is all his fault. It is so nice to blame people at times like these.
Download is done. I unzipped. Took damn long. No luck, the date didn’t matter, it is a download of the current state of the files.
I have to try system backup. I click on the daily button. I am guessing they back up before I deleted the folders, since I made the changes 1 hour before. It couldn’t back up that fast. I had to download it before they started the new back up.
Downloading again. Paranoid, I search for the compression ratio of tar.gz. I calculated the current size and checked with my first download. It matched. Add that to the SQL file size and all I need is for this file to be WAY bigger than the first one in size. 641 mb. It’s a good sign.
I unzipped it. The files shown are weird. I saw a homedir.tar file. 634 mb. Hurray. I unzipped it.
YES.
It is all there. I lost a few files in the end but thats the recent files which I am sure my client still have them in her pc somewhere. In fact, this so called Daily backup is 5 days late. So I have 5 days worth of photos to apologize for in the end. Better than 4 years of photos.
Hope my experience help you if you are in a similar sticky situation.
Comments (5)
no wonder such a hurry. lol
hi there, i was wondering where is the system back up that you mention in option 3? Thanks.
You can get it in the cpanel of your server. Look for backups and download them periodically.
This just saved a lot of me slamming my head on the table after a client deleted the entire codebase I was working on. They were trying to do a backup when they destroyed it. 🙄
THANK YOU! YOU SAVED ME WITH SOLUTION 3