Recovering deleted files

Frode M. Døving frode at ubuntu.com
Sat Sep 30 16:42:07 UTC 2006


Lørdag 30 september 2006 18:20, skrev Dotan Cohen:
> I'm not sure what I did, but all the files in my
> /home/dotancohen/Photos directory are gone. The directory in question
> is on a seperate disk partition from the rest of the system. What
> tools can I use to recover the files?
>
> It is an ext3 filesystem. As soon as I discovered the error I stopped
> using it, but it is still mounted. I'm on the latest up-to-date
> Kubuntu.
>
[cut]

I'm sorry to say that undeletion of files on ext3 volumes are close to 
impossible.

This is a quote from: 
http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/FAQs/ext3-faq.html

[quote]
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.
[/quote]


- Frode




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