Re: Help!!! undelete for ext3fs!!!
brian@copernicus.demon.co.uk (Brian Potkin) writes:
> The man page for Midnight Commander claims that undeletion is possible
> only with an ext2 file system. Your suggestion to explore whether it
> would deal with ext3 is reasonable but doesn't mc use debugfs which is
> designed for an ext2 file system?
>
Writing from the perspective of an up to date Debian/unstable system
only (i really can't be bothered with this rotten potato anymore):
debugfs is part of the e2fsprogs package which in turn is ext3-aware.
> I was aware that Midnight Commander has the facility you describe so I
> used it. It told me it was `loading deleted files information' and was
> still going strong after an hour. I went to bed, dreamt of inodes, got
> up and there it was still churning away.
>
Having become curious after writing my message, i tried this as well
on an ext3 filesystem with similar effect. But i was not patient
enough to stand the procedure for more than an hour... ;-)
> Now that partition only has
> about 50M of free space so I suspect there is insufficient room to write
> the undeleted files to it.
>
Even if you wanted to, you simply couldn't and you better wouldn't,
even if you could because you wouldn't want to use those unlinked
inodes to be overwritten by "restoring" your files.
The last time i succesfully undeleted using MC (almost two years ago)
i tried this and the undeletion routine refused writing data onto the
same partition.
> A way to direct the file listing somewhere
> else would be useful.
>
What should this be good for?
> Imagine a lot of .deb files. Imagine having to rename them correctly!
> The tedium involved, however, is very much offset by the pleasure of
> recovering them.
>
I'm feeling with you. ;-)
> Eventually I used the recover package from the testing distribution.
> You can select deleted files by date and time of deletion and dump them
> to a directory on another partition. It was also quite quick. Having
> read about the difficulty of undeleting files on unix systems I found
> the performance of this program impressive.
>
Thanks for the hint! I wasn't aware about the usefulness of this! :-)
Thanks, P. *8^)
--
------------ Paul Seelig <pseelig@uni-mainz.de> --------------
African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
Johannes Gutenberg-University - Forum 6 - 55099 Mainz/Germany
----------------- http://ntama.uni-mainz.de ------------------
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