I recently decided to replace the SD card in my Raspberry Pi and reinstall the system. Without any special backups in place, I turned to rsync to duplicate /var/lib/docker
with all my containers, including Nextcloud.
Step #1: I mounted an external hard drive to /mnt/temp
.
Step #2: I used rsync to copy the data to /mnt/tmp
. See the difference?
Step #3: I reformatted the SD card.
Step #4: I realized my mistake.
Moral: no one is immune to their own stupidity 😂
If you haven’t done much writing to the SD card, you may be able to recover the data. Data isn’t really “deleted”, it is just labeled as deleted. There is software that can comb through the raw data and try to make sense of what files were there. I don’t know of any specific software, so if anyone knows, please reply
Edit: Another commenter mentioned some success with DMDE
Edit 2: Worth mentioning that this is true of formats. As long as it doesn’t zero out the entire media, it just edits the file system metadata to say there are no files.
PhotoRec and TestDisk are probably the best, but they don’t recover file structure.