HELP! Backup up file vanished!

HELP! Backup up file vanished!

[J Krugman]

I had been working for about 2 hours on an important e-mail (using
RMAIL), when my machine had to be rebooted.  I had not saved my
work (I know, the oldest mistake in the book), but I was confident
that at least I would be able to find a "backup" file of the form
"#*mail*#...".  To my dismay, there is no such file more recent
than several months ago.  I even did a find command on my home
directory (no luck).

My only hope at this point is that this backup has been placed
somewhere else.  Any suggestions?

My OS is Linux.

Thanks!!!

jill

Re: HELP! Backup up file vanished!

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: J Krugman <nospam@nospam.com>
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 20:58:28 +0000 (UTC)
> 
> I had been working for about 2 hours on an important e-mail (using
> RMAIL), when my machine had to be rebooted.  I had not saved my
> work (I know, the oldest mistake in the book), but I was confident
> that at least I would be able to find a "backup" file of the form
> "#*mail*#...".  To my dismay, there is no such file more recent
> than several months ago.

The auto-save file #*mail*#... should have been there, it works for
me.  Perhaps some problem with flushing the disk cache prevented the
file from being written, or perhaps the disk-cleaning scripts that
run when your system reboots somehow deleted it?

Try "M-x recover-session RET", maybe it will help.

Good luck.

Re: HELP! Backup up file vanished!

[gebser]

At 20:58 (UTC-0000) on Tue, 23 Dec 2003 J Krugman said:

= I had been working for about 2 hours on an important e-mail (using
= RMAIL), when my machine had to be rebooted.  I had not saved my
= work (I know, the oldest mistake in the book), but I was confident
= that at least I would be able to find a "backup" file of the form
= "#*mail*#...".  To my dismay, there is no such file more recent
= than several months ago.  I even did a find command on my home
= directory (no luck).
= 
= My only hope at this point is that this backup has been placed
= somewhere else.  Any suggestions?
= 
= My OS is Linux.
= 

Each partition on each disk in your Linux filesystem will (should) have 
a "directory" called lost+found.  If you don't find your file anywhere 
else, you should find it in there.  You'll have to look at the contents 
of the files in lost+found because the filenames generally aren't saved.  
I.e., do a grep on the files there.  Of course lost files are placed 
into the lost+found corresponding to the partition on which the original 
disk file was residing.


hth,
ken