[zapster]

Hello all!

I know this is not directly related to xbmc but xbmc (documentation) led to this incident so I'll give it a try. FYI I am using OpenElec on a RaspberryPi.

I connected my external usb drive (NTFS) to the RPi and added the drive to my video library. Later I learned that i should use separate "sources" for TV shows and movies so I added the two subfolder to the library. The last step was to delete the old source (complete hdd). I found this wiki page (http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Media_sources) which stated that it will only delete the link, not the content:

When you delete a source you only delete the link to that source within XBMC - your files will remain intact.

Unfortunately it deleted the entire disk. 1.5TB movies and TV shows gone. Now I've two questions:

1 (xbmc related): What went wrong? Why is the result the complete opposite of that what the documentation states?

2 (not so much xbmc related): Does anyone see a chance that i can restore the content? The physical information should be there as I've not written any new data to the disk. Currently I'm trying to restore my stuff using photorec but it does not look very promising yet. Any other tips?

Many thanks in advance,
zapster

[amet]

"When you delete a source you only delete the link to that source within XBMC - your files will remain intact"

did you remove the source or did you remove files within the source?

if you did opposite of adding the source than there is no way you would have deleted the 1.5 TB of files, you must have clicked "select all", "delete" and confirmed the warning that stated that "this cannot be undone". not sure what you expected there.

if you highlight the source, hit "c" and "remove source" no files will be lost

[zapster]

if you did opposite of adding the source than there is no way you would have deleted the 1.5 TB of files, you must have clicked "select all", "delete" and confirmed the warning that stated that "this cannot be undone". not sure what you expected there.

if you highlight the source, hit "c" and "remove source" no files will be lost

I'm sure that I did not select all files. At the level where the "Add source..." button is located I selected the entry with the name of the drive and selected an option in the context menu. I am not sure if it was titled "remove source" or "delete source". There was confirmation question, that was the reason why i looked it up in the documentation.

[nickr]

so at the filesystem level you cannot list the files?

[zapster]

so at the filesystem level you cannot list the files?

Nope, just the empty folder. Like if i've done a `rm *-rf`.

[whitebelly]

I'd connect it to a PC and see if the files are really gone.

If so, there are a number of free programs to recover deleted files. You should be able to recover most of them. Depending on the software, it is possible you may need a second large drive to store all the undeleted files while the software works on the problem drive. Hopefully it can just recover the folder index structure i place.

Don't use the drive at all in the meantime or you may destroy some of the content.

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecove...ograms.htm

[nickr]

Join it to a PC but mount it READONLY.

[Kib]

Did the drive not just simply get unmounted ?

Either that or you navigated within the source you created and deleted files there. But than the source would still be listed.
There is no way to delete files from the context menu of a source, which is very much by design.

You do not see (m)any posts on these forums from users deleting their files when trying to remove a source and the reason is that it is not possible.