I had a similar experience several years ago, though not vacation related. I was testing a script I was writing, and had a critical typo, which ended up wiping out (rm -fr) all my website code (it wasn't a business thing yet, so I wasn't taking backups in any reliable manner).<p>After my heart skipping a beat realizing I didn't have any decently recent backups, I unmounted the partition, whipped out perl and scanned the device for instances of "<?" and grabbing the following 5000 bytes, dumping the results to a collection of incrementally named files.<p>I had to manually go through the files, clean them up, and remember what their filename was based on the code, but that wasn't as bad as it sounds. The hardest part was the conflicting versions, since there were lots and lots of remnants from old replaced files there. But about 8 hours later, I had everything recovered.<p>Backups went on a cronjob after that.