Re: Help!!! undelete for ext3fs!!!
On Sun, Mar 03, 2002 at 09:22:14PM +0100, Paul Seelig wrote:
> 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 took what the man page for mc said at face value and didn't dig any
further to look in detail at the e2fsprogs documentation. Thanks for
the correction; it gives me some incentive to make an ext3 partition and
test how debugfs deals with deleted files on it.
> > 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... ;-)
This behaviour appears to be a bug in mc and has been reported in bug
report #121917.
> > 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 couple of hours after making this statement it struck me that writing
to an unmounted partition is not likely to succeed.
> > A way to direct the file listing somewhere
> > else would be useful.
> >
> What should this be good for?
Not much! Basically, I was having difficulty understanding mc's
behaviour and not having used it for this purpose before I made the
mistake of assuming it was copying the files and required room to write
them out somewhere.
Brian.
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