Re: Need help undeleting a Big gz compressed tar ball

Thank you Bob. The Seagate drive has NTFS, I never reformatted it. There is where the big tar file was.
Here is another question: How does the creation of a tar.gz ball occur? Is it

a) first compressing files and directories and then taring them
or
b) taring and then compressing?

If the procedure is a), how big the compressed chunks are, how exactly does it happen? It may explain the recovered pieces of 20,30,50 etc GB that are declared by file to be "data".

One experience I got: Never create big tar balls unless you have the computer power to handle it. Especially if it is compressed.

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 8:18 PM, Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> wrote:

To Ro wrote:
> After a few hours, my Big.tar.gz was gone. I tried testdisk, but has not
> been very succesful. I was able to see and copy to another disk about 18
> files of different sizes, from 6 gb to 70 gb, with names such as inode_xxxxx
> Running the command "file inode_xxxxx" yields not much, it says data file.
> The process of copying by testdisk had to be halted because the target disk
> was full, and testdisk hung for several hours (night time) before I stopped
> the whole thing.
> What should I do?

What filesystem are you using? Because if it is ext3 then things look
pretty grim. See this reference:

http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/FAQs/ext3-faq.html

Q: How can I recover (undelete) deleted files from my ext3 partition?
Actually, you can't! This is what one of the developers, Andreas
Dilger, said about it:

In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a
crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas
ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks
the inode as "deleted" and leaves the block pointers alone.

Your only hope is to "grep" for parts of your files that have been
deleted and hope for the best.

Otherwise everything I know about recovering deleted files is here:

http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/#I-used-rm-to-remove-a-file_002e-How-can-I-get-it-back-now_003f

It is a pretty pessimistic view. I hope others have more optimistic
information for you.

Good luck!
Bob