Re: recover ext3 deletion

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

Harvey Kelly said:

> And I'm back at the prompt, with nothing recovered as I can tell.
>  Please, where am I going wrong?  In addition to losing everything (no
> back-ups, I know, I know), a 3,000 word essay due in Monday has been lost.

hate it when that happens ..I've tried to do the same after making
mistakes like you mentioned. I have even been able to recover a lot
of data.

but making sense of the data is entirely different. Recovering hundreds
or thousands of blocks of data doesn't do me much good if files are split
up in different blocks/(inodes), and some inodes may have bits of more then
one file.

I have no suggestions other then do backups, but I feel your pain. There
are methods that can be implimented in linux to help restore files(try
searching freshmeat for undelete) but last I looked they required the
methods to be implimented at the time of the deletion.

reminds me of running the various undelete programs back on DOS or
win9x, they did about the same thing, could recover (parts) of the data
but rarely was the result anything that I could use.

even the more modern stuff, I tried running a recent(1-2 year old) copy
of executive software's undelete utility on a NT4 system, just for shits
and grins, and it couldn't recover anything, I deleted a file(to test),
and tried to recover it a few minutes later and there was no trace of
it that the utility could find.

I too am very bad at backing up my personal data, I do back it up
but its not often(maybe once or twice a year). Now that I have a DAT
drive I may start doing it more often though.


nate