Automount lost (moved?) files from my /data folder

Question

I copied some things to the /data folder on my ubuntu 10.04. After restarting all the data was gone. After some investigation I figured out that automount was using the /data folder (it appeared in lsof | grep /data and /etc/auto.master contains /data entry ), which I completely forgot about. Now, I have two questions:

1) Is there a way to recover my data or has automount deleted it?

2) df -h tells me that my / partition has 1.3 GB free while I am sure it had 3 GB before I copied the stuff to my /data folder, and the "missing" 1.7 GB seems exactly right for the size of my copied stuff. Where would this data be moved to (i.e. this would answer 1) and how do I get my 1.7 GB back?

Thanks

EDIT:

my /etc/auto.master

/data           yp:auto.data
/homes          yp:auto.homes
/projects       yp:auto.projects
/services       yp:auto.services
/users          yp:auto.users

my /etc/fstab

proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
UUID=21f6ee12-734a-4d3f-a23a-079c2a5381c6 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
UUID=50b83a82-f894-409e-939d-1908ca8aacf1 /boot           ext3    defaults        0       2
UUID=afac7a83-2fc4-410a-a2ea-06f3eb7ce0d5 /home           ext4    defaults        0       2
UUID=4a5ae91c-89fb-4d3e-ba51-81896d61dae3 none            swap    sw              0       0

Answer 1

First of all, the automount service is mounting a folder from your NIS (hence the yp:) to /data. If you copied your files to /data while the autofs service was running, then your files are now on whatever server was exporting to /data.

If the service was not active when you copied and it is now, then your files will not be visible as /data now points to a remote folder. So, stop the autofs service:

sudo service autofs stop

Check if your data is there:

ls /data

If it is and everything is in order, change your auto.master file to NOT use your /data folder then restart the autofs service:

sudo service autofs restart