In data recovery 101 I made the statement “Don’t Panic” when referring to data recovery.

Tonight I had the opportunity to get my son to put that into practice. For those unaware, my eldest is at University studying for a Comp Sci degree and it leaves me with a warm feeling that he asked me first rather than his CS mates or professors.

But I digress.

His situation was that an external hard drive he’d been using to store backups of his data had decided that he wouldn’t be allowed to access the data any more. The added complexity, as far as I was concerned, is that the drive had been formatted under Ubuntu and I have never done any data recovery under this OS.

So I applied my second axiom, also found in the above linked post, of “doing nothing until the situation had been properly and impassionately assessed”.

First thing I recommended was to do a Google search and the second was to search the Ubuntu forums. For my part I also tweeted about it and @wvpv responded with what was my first hit on Google after typing in Ubuntu data recovery.

However, the main thing I stressed he do before even attempting any form of recovery was to try a new USB cable and second to open the external HDD box and reseat all the internal cables. If they didn’t work, then the next step was to try the HDD in another system.

Anyway, long story short, several hours went by before I got a text to say all was well and he’d retrieved all his data by plugging it in via an eSata adapter on another PC.

So my third caveat / axiom to add to those above is:

Always check the simple things first