Upgraded to Lion, lost all files

[atlfootball]

Tonight, I upgraded my Macbook Pro to Lion. Previously, I had encrypted my files using FileVault on Snow Leopard.

I backed all my files up using Carbon Copy Cloner to an external hard drive. This included the Applications, Library System and Users folders.

Upon starting up in Lion, my computer accepted my password to login but said that FireVault did not recognize my password, so I could not actually get in.

Seeing this, I started in safe mode and created another dummy account. Reading online postings, I deleted the original account, leaving the home folder untouched as an option. I created a new account with the same name as my old original account.

Upon logging in to my new "home" account, I did not find any files, and the terminal command "cd Users" did not work which ruined the plan to re-create my original account. Upon connecting my external hard drive with the backed up information, I found nothing under my home folder in the User folder, but found everything else in every other folder (Applications, library, etc).

I know that my information is still on the hard drive on this computer and on my external drive but I have no idea how to get it all back, any help would be appreciated.

 

[GGJstudios]

Backing up large files, mounted disk images, and FileVault home directories

FileVault protects the contents of your home directory by enclosing it in an encrypted disk image. When you log in, the encrypted disk image is unlocked via your login and password and mounted for use as your home directory. Mounted disk images pose an interesting problem to incremental backup utilities. By simply being mounted and accessed (e.g. via browsing the contents), the content of a disk image, and thus the disk image file itself, is modified. If you run CCC while logged in to a FileVault-protected account or while a read/write disk image is mounted, there is a strong chance that the disk image will be modified while it is being backed up, resulting in a corrupted version of the disk image on your backup volume. Also, because the contents of your FileVault-protected home directory are technically on another volume, CCC will not back up the contents of your home directory when backing up your root filesystem (e.g. your boot drive).

For these reasons, you should either exclude your FileVault disk image file from your backup routine while logged into a FileVault-protected account (and set up a separate routine for backing up the contents of your home directory), or you should only run CCC while logged into an account that is not protected by FileVault. Likewise, if you have other very large files (e.g. Parallels or VMWare container files) that are frequently modified, you should either quit the applications that modify those files for the duration of the backup, or you should set up a separate task for backing up those files when they are not typically in use.