[Gnu-arch-users] catastrophic deletion

[Ron Gorodetzky]

Hello all,

I've run into a little problem.  I've been using arch for several small
projects for the past several months.  I've had a couple central
archives in which I set up a project and a few local archives in which I
would do my work which I would later merge into the main archives.

Unfortunately a harddrive crash killed my main archives and it seems as
though I never made a backup of them  (I think I've learned this lesson
the hard way too many times).  However, I do have a working copy of
every project in those main archives.  I kept them around for merging
purposes.  I also have my personal archives that have tagged projects
from the main archives.  

So now I have two questions.  

1. Is there a way to restore the archive from the data I do have?

2. What should I do about my branches?  Their ancestor doesn't exist
anymore.  Is there a way to make the merging work with a different main
archive?  Should I now never create a main archive with the same name as
the original that I lost?  Are there other issues that I may have missed
with changing the past so dramatically?

These were small projects who's development history isn't terribly
important so I could always create brand new archives from scratch.  But
it would be nice to know if there was any sort of recourse in such a
situation.

thanks,

Ron