Data lost in home directory after upgrading

[drahul82]

Hi,
I recently upgraded my ubuntu from 10.04 to 14.04. There were two user accounts: ionadmin and ionuser. ionadmin was root account. There were directories under /home/ionadmin, e.g. /home/ionadmin/yyy. After the upgrade, the directories in /home/ionadmin are no longer present. Could anyone please tell me if it is possible to retrieve these data? I had important data in these directories.
Thanks,
Rahul

[grahammechanical]

In Ubuntu the root account is disabled. We are not supposed to activate it. If you have activated the root account then the upgrade would not recognise it. That is my guess. It is also possible that the folders and files are still there. You can try running the file manager with administrator privileges by using this command


sudo - H nautilus

Now you might be able to see those folders and files in what is actually another user account. You took a big risk upgrading from 10.04 through 12.04 to 14.04 without backing up that important data. I hope you did not upgrade by doing a fresh install of 14.04 over the 10.04 partition? If you did, did you tick to format the partition? If you did tick to format the partition then we are in a completely different universe of data recovery.

Regards.

[drahul82]

Thanks a lot for your response. I think, the technician formatted the partition. This is his response: "but all of the operating system information to include the home directories is formatted and replaced with the new OS". Do you have any suggestions on any possible ways to recover the data in this case?

Regards,
Rahul

[deadflowr]

Grab a livecd and try something like testdisk.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

If at all possible, if you do not have livecd, try downloading one from a different machine.
You want to limit your access or usage to the messed-up system as much as possible.
To avoid ever writing to the disk.
Every time you write to the disk, it becomes that much harder to recover.

If that makes snese, or helps...

[furtom]

Well, if the partition with root was formatted, then Ubuntu was not upgraded, but rather deleted and a newer version was installed.

What I suspect happened is simple: If you created a root account, that home directory would NOT be in /home, but rather in /root. I think your IT guy formatted / but not the separate /home partition. That's why your regular user files were not deleted but your admin account was.

Sadly, it will be difficult if not impossible to recover those files as they have probably been overwritten with the new instillation.

[matt_symes]

Hi


I think, the technician formatted the partition.

Do yourself a favour in the future.

Don't use that "technician" as, if they didn't make a back up of your data for you before upgrading, they are in no way a technician.

Make sure a backup has been taken of the *entire* system before upgrading otherwise don't let anyone upgrade it.

deadflowr suggested teskdisk. That's my suggestion also and good luck. I hope you can retrieve your important files.

Kind regards

[drahul82]

Thanks all for your responses. Just to provide you all an idea:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/os-root 46G 20G 24G 46% /
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev 63G 4.0K 63G 1% /dev
tmpfs 13G 1.4M 13G 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 63G 0 63G 0% /run/shm
none 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user
/dev/sdb1 9.7T 7.2T 2.0T 79% /results
/dev/sdb2 15T 12T 2.8T 81% /rawdata
/dev/sdc1 37T 31T 5.9T 84% /mnt/Despina
/dev/mapper/os-home 19G 45M 18G 1% /home
/dev/mapper/os-tmp 92G 60M 87G 1% /tmp
/dev/mapper/os-var 19G 4.4G 13G 26% /var

there were three directories for three different users under /home. One of them was ionadmin which also has root access. My directories were under /home/ionadmin. It seems to be that /home got formatted during the upgrade.

[drahul82]

Well, I tried TestDisk last night. It only shows those files or directories that were deleted after the upgrade was performed. This means that it will be impossible to retrieve the data that were deleted due to formatting the partition during the OS install. Thanks everyone for your suggestions!

[matt_symes]

Hi


Well, I tried TestDisk last night. It only shows those files or directories that were deleted after the upgrade was performed. This means that it will be impossible to retrieve the data that were deleted due to formatting the partition during the OS install. Thanks everyone for your suggestions!

Unfortunately i expected that might be the case.

A formatted partition will have lost the files in it unless you use a professional service.

Kind regards