I’m incredibly glad I didn’t release the first version of mountMerge last night. Apparently Java’s “delete” command does not respect symbolic links under Windows. As a result, my entire collection of files – over 800GB worth – was unceremoniously nuked.
I’ve spent the past day trying to recover what I can, since the delete operation didn’t actually overwrite the original files. They just didn’t appear in the directory structure. As of now, things have been shuffled around a little bit, but everything seems to be recovered okay.
The recovery app I used (which works fine under Vista, by the way) is called FreeUndelete. I’m not sure how its forensics compared to something like Runtime Software’s GetDataBack for NTFS, but it’s certainly quicker for what I needed to recover.
The application works really well, other than absolutely killing my filesystem. As a result, I’m going to do some more testing before I release it into the wild.