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On 16/07/20 16:14, comrade meowski wrote: > On 16/07/2020 11:37, fraser kendall wrote: >> I have just done the stupidest thing. I was freeing up (rm -rf) space >> on what I thought was a storage directory (/srv), but I have now just >> discovered that it contained a critical qemu image. The image is a W7 >> VM and is still running; it appears unaffected. The /srv partition >> is the largest on this machine and the testdisk recovery image of this >> partition (~170G) is too large to fit anywhere on the hard drive. >> >> This machine is mission critical. I cannot take it offline for another >> 6 hours, and I'll need to have it back up asap, (within an hour) so I >> need to plan my attack. >> >> So some very naive questions. >> >> Best option: 1) can I retrieve the deleted qcow image from a running >> instance of that image? >> >> Fall back option: 2) does anyone know if a new installation of the >> (Dell) W7 iso will still activate now that W7 is EOL? >> >> I know that option 2 (writing to disk) will reduce the possibility of a >> testdisk recovery. So, here's Q3: can i squeeze the second W7 VM into a >> 6G qcow image (remaining free space in /home)? >> >> I'm not going to do anything for a while, except think. And hide from >> the boss. All help would be appreciated. > > Haha, whoops... We've all done it though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ > > 1: I'm pretty sure no, any attempt to clone the running 'orphaned' VM > will try to reference the on-disk files for a copy, which of course won't > work. You really want to avoid writing to the disk any more as well of > course. > > 2: Good question but I presume not now it's fully EOL. If you're having > to activate new Win7 VMs to rebuild it or something you can buy yourself > time with 'slmgr -rearm' or similar just to get by. There are plenty of > tools available online for sysadmins with little patience for Microsoft's > activation nonsense when they're rushing to fix critical problems - which > I'm sure you know about. > > 3: It sounds like the machine in question is really up against the wall > and that's seriously hampering your recovery options. Is is that short on > space (well you did say you were freeing up room when this happened I > guess)? You've also got a very narrow window to work within it seems. > > Can you say a bit more about the machine? It's presumably a linux box, > and is the /srv partition that was holding the qemu image formatted ext4? > Any RAID or anything to complicate things? > > I'd say you have a choice to make - one little hour isn't enough time to > reliably recover that file so you need to decide what's more important, > that qemu image or the machine's uptime. If it's uptime then you're > screwed and start planning for rebuilding the image from scratch. If it's > the image, then you should have already sacrificed uptime and turned the > damn machine off to stop it writing to the disk! > > You _may_ have a middle option if you're lucky - have a spare disk on > hand and use the single hour you have to clone the disk from the qemu box > to the spare disk and then swap it in. Test and reboot your system so > it's back up and running for the end of your window but now you've got > the original disk with your deleted qemu file in it and as much time as > you need for recovery. > > Speaking of which, presuming it's ext4 you might want to try out > ext4magic for undeletion - other than that it sounds like you already > know testdisk and can do the recovery bit yourself. But as you know, it's > really not helping you that the system is still up and running and > scribbling all over it's storage as we speak. > > Good luck! > > * PS: I made it this far ok but now I have to ask: > > WHY IS IT NOT BACKED UP ARE YOU INSANE > > > > > Nothing to add here, but absolutely +5 to all of this .. more-or-less flawless reply ;) :thumbsup:
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