Say no to Ctrl + X !!!

Don't cut, only copy-paste!

Well, this is an account of a personal tragedy (sort of!!) and a consequent advice to all my readers.

I use Dell Inspiron 1520 (T7250, 2GB RAM, 160 GB HDD) with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. Recently i purchased a WD My Passport Essential 500 GD External HDD to accommodate my ever increasing pile of data. Today, i needed to free up some 8GB of space on my internal hard drive. So i decided to move some of my family pics and videos to my external drive. As i wanted to free up space immediately, instead of copying the files, i cut them. Little did i know then that it would cause me dearly a bit later!

As the file moving operation was nearing its completion, some awkward movement of my very own dear legs caused the USB cable of the hard drive to disconnect from the system. This unsafe removal of the disk, without proper unmounting, didn’t see to be much of an issue till i looked for the files that should have been there in my external drive. To my utter shock and surprise, they were not there! They were neither in the source drive. I searched my external drive umpteen number of times, using GUI, CLI, Windows, everything but no avail! I had lost my data!

Those were important family pictures and i am not sure whether i have another copy of them or not. Yeah, i know there are recovery tools available and i tried some but these jpgs would never show up anywhere. They were gone! I have no idea that why did this happen? The files which could not be moved at the time of the accidental removal of the USB cable were intact in the source drive, so the files which had moved should have been intact in the destination, that is my external drive, but alas, it was not the case. Was it caused by some issue in the external drive, or in the Ubuntu file copier, the clipboard, i have no idea!

Anyway, let bygones be bygones, i blogged about this just to give all my readers a li’l warning that never go for cut-paste of your files while copying to any external drive, be it flash drive, memory stick, external hard drive, whatever. Always use copy-paste and only when you are sure that the files have been copied properly, you delete the files from the source drive.

Just my 2 cents to keep your important files safe.

Do mention some similar incidents that you have faced or your opinion on the reason of this failure in your comments.