The U.S.S. Quad Damage

I'm sure I've mentioned reiser4 to anyone who I've happened to see in the past month or so. If you didn't know, it's been released. I could hardly contain my excitement. I downloaded the latest 2.6.9rc1 patch from kernel.org and started compiling. I also got udev and the new shutdown system to boot (pun intended). Everything seemed to work OK. Time to backup my home directory and try the bastard out:

cd /

tar -jcvpf /fatman/home.tar.bz2 home/

---blah blah blah---

Errors

Oh yes! I shouldn't leave the drive mounted with rw access.

umount /home

mount /home -r

tar -jxpvf /fatman/home.tar.bz2 home/

---blah blah blah---

umount /home

mkreiser4 /dev/hda5

---blah blah blah---

mount /home

tar -jxpvf /fatman/home.tar.bz2

Most of my files didn't appear. I felt faint. I checked through my command history:

tar -jxpvf /fatman/home.tar.bz2 home/

That's an 'x', not a 'c'. Damn letters had to be right next to each other. So most of my drive went to that great bit bucket in the sky. I immediately took a snapshot. Now I'm stuck here going through my drive block by block, looking for remnants of things I can scavenge.

Actually, I'm more surprised at how little I lost. I was pretty worried about losing all my email, but then I realised it was all spam and mail from you guys, so it wasn't a big loss. I recovered my bookmarks and liferea OPML list. My gaim history's gone, but maybe that's a good thing. I just need to get my lecture notes again, and D&D SRDs.