Recover screen buffer after shutdown

Question

I had a screen session running a process could take days to complete. There was a cooling failure in the server room and the machines were shutdown, and now rebooted. Is there a way to recover my screen buffers? I know the processes will be terminated etc. But I would like to see the output and try to salvage some of the work. Certainly that was buffered somewhere (although maybe it's been cleaned up by now?).

In the future if I know that I want to see / save output to the screen, what's the best way to do that?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

screen stores scrollback buffers in memory, not on disk. As such, there's no way to recover them from a process that is no longer running. (While there is a faint possibility that the buffers were swapped out to disk, identifying and recovering them will be extremely difficult.)

If the output of a process is important, have it written to disk, either by piping the process through tee, or by enabling logging on the screen tab it's on (using the log command, mapped to ^AH by default).