How to recover? Wrong MacFusion mount --> Everything lost

[eerola]

I was working too fast when mounting a FTP drive in my MacBook using MacFusion. I mounted the drive to ~my_name not to ~my_home_directory/mount_directory. And BANG! My ~my_name was empty.

I did not do anything else but a reboot to get rid of the wrong mount.

After rebooting, I still can not see my settings, applications or documents.

When taking terminal and going to /Users, I see only my_name and Shared. my_name shows it was created when I entered the wrong mount point.

find / -name "IMG*" on the terminal does not return any of my photos.

Is there a way to recover from this, or was the MacFusion + MacFuse really able to wipe my HD clean and erase all my data in a blink of an eye?

 

[madog]

No idea what apps you are referring to, but is it possible that whatever default directory was being used to load your information, was somehow switched?

Orrr, it sounds like you could have written over your User folder or something like that. Are there any other folders/users listed in the User folder? I know that if one was to rename their home folder, when restarting the rename will instead act like a new user was created, and boot to the empty user folder, but the previous user will still be in the User folder under the original name.

Edit, after reading your post again, it doesn't sound like it. It's possible that somehow the app completely rewrote over your home folder, and so the OS just rebuilt the home directory with the orginial name from scratch.

I suppose you can try those apps and attempt the same process on a new, empty folder and see if it writes over that without any warnings or input from yourself.

 

[eerola]

This is pretty unbelievable! The system really can reset the profile in a blink of an eye without any warnings!

The techie in me says that obviously there is something in the system, which oberves my ~username directory and if this directory has any problems (=is empty), it will initialize the user directory. But it seems to be that the initializing module does its work to /Users/username. Which in my case caused this a total disaster.

So, I purchased Data Rescue II and searched for my data. It was spread all around the hard disk space, directory structures gone and file names corrupted. I would have been able to recover some useless stuff, which I had deleted months ago, perfect with directory structures and names and everything. But the user directory - which I wanted back - had got a pretty good hit from the system.

The good thing is that I have now after several nights of work more-or-less all my important files rescued.

 

[Amdahl]

I would have expected that when the wrong drive was unmounted, your home folder would have reappeared. If it was unlinked, I think there is a bug that should be reported to somebody. Afterall, if some sort of initialization happened, shouldn't it have happened to the mounted drive, not the folder that was obscured?

 

[eerola]

I would have expected that when the wrong drive was unmounted, your home folder would have reappeared...

Yes, this is exactly what I would have expected too. Unfortunately, this did not happen. After unmounting, I had a freshly initialized home directory.