As the philosopher once said, "Into each life, a few disk crashes must fall." Or something like that. Today's relatively huge disks make it more tempting than ever to store large collections of data online, such as your entire music collection or all of the research associated with your thesis. Backups can be problematic, as today's disks are much larger than most backup media, and backups can't restore any data that was created or modified after the last backup was made. Luckily, the fact that any Linux/Unix device can be accessed as a stream of characters presents some interesting opportunities for restoring some or all of your data even after a hard drive failure. When disaster strikes, consult this hack for recovery tips.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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